A calculator website that does $28 million 🤑

May 07, 2023

Howdy hackers 🤠,

Y'all are in for a treat with this newsletter. Saddle up and grab your marketing lassos. Let’s get right into it 📈🌄.

In this edition of GHTV, we’ll examine:

→ How Brian Chesky got everyone talking about Airbnb, again

→ 10 simple million-dollar websites

→ Coca-Cola’s legendary 'Share a Coke' campaign

10 simple million dollar websites🤑

Most people go through their lives without ever actualizing a million-dollar idea. Valuable ideas like these, they think, must be incredibly complex.

Sometimes we forget that a big idea can be as easy as creating a common-sense solution to an ordinary problem. Why not embrace simplicity?

With this in mind, we compiled a list of 10 websites that disprove the common misconception that a successful endeavor can’t be a simple one.

We’ll look at the numbers re: search traffic and direct traffic, the average visit duration for each user, bounce rate, pages per visit, global distribution of audience, and our revenue calculation.

Let’s dive in.

  1. Calculator.net → $28M/year

We live in an age where everyone has at least one calculator on their person at basically all times. And yet Calculator.net continues to thrive. I would be surprised if you’d never been through Calculator.net. Let the simplicity and traffic of this site inspire you.

  1. WordCounter.net → $1.8M/year

What does WordCounter.net do? It counts words. Copy and paste your text into the online editor and it will provide you with the count of its words. And its characters. For content marketers and copywriters, the text box tracks KW density. The processor also analyzes reading level, reading time, and speaking time.

  1. DaFont.com → $21.9M/year

DaFont.com is an archive of fonts that can be downloaded for free. You can browse fonts by style, by creator / author, or by popularity.

What this site has over something like Wordcounter.net is that, just in virtue of its function, people are generally going to spend a lot more time on the site, often navigating more pages. It’s a good setup.

  1. CitationMachine.net → $12.7M/year

What we have here is something that is a little more selectively targeted. Students and academic professionals use CitationMachine.net to do their citation pages for them— always one of the most annoying, most dreaded parts of submitting work.

  1. 1000logos.net → $410K/year

Such a simple concept. 1000logos.net is a massive database of logos- some have said “all of the logos in the world”- with information about the logos’ histories and meanings. All images are available as downloadable png images.

  1. remove.bg → $27.8M/year

This is an incredible idea that is very efficiently executed. In just five seconds, remove.bg automates the process of removing the background from any image. One click. Love to see it.

  1. TimeAndDate.com → $26.7M/year

Is there a more classic simple site than TimeAndDate.com? Equipped with a world clock, digital and printer-ready calendars (for multiple years), and other vaguely time-and-date-related services, this comes across as a very low-maintenance concept. You’ve gotta admit, they stretch a thin idea out pretty far. It shows in the results.

  1. Name-Generator.co.uk → $1.3M/year

Name-Generator.co.uk gets a decent amount of action. Basically, it creates first and last names. Pen names, pet names, band names, baby names, middle names, character names, blog names. Names!

  1. Wheel of Names → $3.4M/year

WheelOfNames.com is another of these sites that I have a bit of experience with. Teachers use it all the time. So do over-zealous group chat members. It’s a Wheel of Fortune-esque way of doing raffles. There’s no real necessity, but there’s still a demand. Fun site, and does well for itself.

  1. Pickerwheel.com → $1.4M/year

Interesting to note that Pickerwheel.com, compared to Wheel of Names, provides an almost identical service, and uncannily similar analytics— other than the fact that it generates under 50% of the traffic. Speaks to the value of SEO? Maybe.

If you’re anything like me, some of these sites were familiar. I can almost guarantee you’ve wound up on a few before. Maybe even recently.

But it takes a certified growth hacker to land on Time & Date dot com and realize that it’s a multi-million dollar operation. Just try telling one of the less entrepreneurial people in your life that www.calculator.net clears $28M a year. I doubt they’ll believe you, at least at first. So many of these concepts are practical, simple, and well-executed. Sometimes, a million-dollar idea reads like a basic one. But if it’s executed well, it might be your ticket to the big leagues.

 Growth Hack HOF: The 'Share a Coke' campaign 👑

In 2011, Coca-Cola launched the 'Share a Coke' campaign. The idea behind it was simple yet brilliant: replace the brand logo on bottles with popular names.

The move became a massive hit:

  • In Australia, where the campaign first launched, over 250 million Coke products were sold in a country of 23 million people

  • In the US, 1.25 million more teens tried Coke during the campaign, and it helped increase soft-drink sales by 2%

  • Consumers shared more than 500,000 photos using the #ShareaCoke hashtag, and Coca-Cola gained around 25 million new Facebook followers

  • A variation of the campaign, ‘Share a Coke and a Song’, printed popular song lyrics on Coke bottles. The effort blew up and generated the most liked instagram picture of the time.

Imagine the high praise received by whoever came up with this strategy at Coca-Cola.

So what can you learn from this legendary growth hack?

  1. Leverage the power of personalization: The 'Share a Coke' campaign demonstrated the effectiveness of personalization. By putting popular names on the packaging, Coca-Cola made consumers with those names feel special and connected to the brand. Think about how you can incorporate a part of your customer’s identity into your product to make them feel special.

  2. Create a sense of scarcity: The number of Cokes with each name were limited. People rushed to buy their own names or of their loved ones before they ran out. Find a way to communicate urgency and scarcity to your customer. Couple that with personalization, and you might just make it to the growth hacks Hall of Fame.