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$30k to $71m in 90 days

wade1mil

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Here's a quick story about how solving a problem can become profitable quickly.

A few months ago, the image host imgur.com started blocking pro-Donald Trump photos. The images were no better or worse than photos of other presidential candidates, so it was more censoring than anything. So, Donald Trump supporters on reddit and other websites were left with a problem. They had photos to share, but no image host.

An alternate image hosting website, sli.mg, somehow let people know that they would allow their photos to be hosted on their server. It works in much the same way. Approximately three months ago, the website had a "valuation" of $30,000. Whether that number was accurate or not, who knows. But today, that same website has a valuation of $71,000,000!

I'm going to assume both of these numbers are inaccurate, but that's a 2,400% increase in valuation. I'm sure it has a lot to do with how much traffic they get, because they make their money off display ads. So the 2,400% might be a better number to take from this.

They solved a real problem for a passionate market, and it took off like wildfire. Sure beats the hell out of hard-selling products that people don't need.
 
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Guest34764

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It's becoming common occurrence for these giants in their industries to censor others.

Twitch has been banning others for saying anything they don't agree with.

Youtube is banning others for "harassment" of otherYouTubers now, and their copyright system is absolutely broken.

Imgur has done the same and censored others.

If someone can take over these giants and push a censor free version, there could be some big bucks, but I doubt that will happen anytime soon with youtube because of the system they have with paying YouTubers.

Hitbox has invaded Twitches market, but I doubt they'll be able to take it over as it's just not as good as Twitch.

I could see a Image sharing website take over Imgur though.
 

RHL

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Wade, you're reducing slimgur's success to an "action fake." You need to mention their creation as an FPH spinoff of imgur (why it was actually created), their rivals' attempts to DDoS them and get them in trouble with the FBI by uploading CP, and then doing and end-run around them to get their hosts to cancel their hosting contracts, self-funding, etc. Yes, their site is worth millions, but this is a criminally facile analysis of how the site started, like saying "Tesla went from being worth a few million to a few billion in eight hours!" (when they went public). There's much more to the story.
 

JAJT

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There's much more to the story.

A lot of the details are largely irrelevant IMHO. Yes the backstory is full of politics and hate and free speech and spite and all that jazz. But that's largely irrelevant to WHY it worked (which is all that really matters).

The bottom line is that a hole in the market opened up (regardless of the reason) and someone filled it, and traffic to that site has gone from almost nothing to a tremendous sum as people felt like their views were heard on one platform where it wasn't on another. That's the power of adding value and solving problems. Find a crowd of frustrated people and give them the solution they want. That's the take-away.
 
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MitchC

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It's becoming common occurrence for these giants in their industries to censor others.

Twitch has been banning others for saying anything they don't agree with.

Youtube is banning others for "harassment" of otherYouTubers now, and their copyright system is absolutely broken.

Imgur has done the same and censored others.

If someone can take over these giants and push a censor free version, there could be some big bucks, but I doubt that will happen anytime soon with youtube because of the system they have with paying YouTubers.

Hitbox has invaded Twitches market, but I doubt they'll be able to take it over as it's just not as good as Twitch.

I could see a Image sharing website take over Imgur though.

Even Google censored the autofill results when you type in Hilary Clinton's court case thing
 

TheGrind

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It's becoming common occurrence for these giants in their industries to censor others.

Twitch has been banning others for saying anything they don't agree with.

Youtube is banning others for "harassment" of otherYouTubers now, and their copyright system is absolutely broken.

Imgur has done the same and censored others.

If someone can take over these giants and push a censor free version, there could be some big bucks, but I doubt that will happen anytime soon with youtube because of the system they have with paying YouTubers.

Hitbox has invaded Twitches market, but I doubt they'll be able to take it over as it's just not as good as Twitch.

I could see a Image sharing website take over Imgur though.
Facebook has been banning a lot of people with conservative political beliefs as well. Me being one of them, simply for making conservative posts. Not offensive, conservative.

It's getting ridiculous.
 
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MJ DeMarco

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Right now there is a HUGE opportunity to create an alternate Twitter service.

Twitter has gone full Pravda.

If you can get a few influential figures who have been banned from Twitter (re: MiloY) to grass-roots the launch, you'd be creating some great momentum and an instant base. The trouble in these new services is always the launch and creating a base that can virally spawn.

100 users doesn't cut it.
 

RHL

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A lot of the details are largely irrelevant IMHO.

I think you're mistaken. I'm not trying to dump on anybody, I'm just concerned that the tagline makes it sound like making millions can be a matter of 30 days and simply finding and meeting a felt need, easy peezy. If libel lawsuits and FBI investigations are "easy," sure. These guys paid their dues. This is all approximate dates and a rough outline, so bear with me.

2 Years Ago

The now-banned subreddit (a subsection of Reddit) "FatPeopleHate," which focused on ridiculing the obese generally but most specifically on some of the stereotypical bad excuses that fat people use to justify their obesity ("It's genetic!" As they drink another gallon of soda) began being censored by imgur because they saw the images as bullying (which they mostly were). As 99% of the content was images and Reddit is streamlined to work most efficiently with imgur, this caused big problems for FPH. FPH already had the "alt community" mindset where they saw Reddit and its allies as an enemy which barely tolerated their existence and wanted to stamp them out. Sli.mg is founded as Slimgur (the slim image sharer, a nod to its connection to fat people hate). It is founded by 1-2 people and self financed. FPH bans linking to imgur in retaliation for censorship. It is one of the most active communities on Reddit, so traffic to slimgur explodes, and it looks to be an overnight success.​

1.75 Years Ago

Slimgur immediately suffers from attacks, though whether they are from disgruntled overweight people or some other source in the "social justice warrior" quadrant is never clear. This includes attack tactics like DDoS (finally halted by cloudflare) and uploading child porn to slimgur then immediately contacting the FBI and Slimgur's host without giving slimgur a chance to resolve the issue, resulting in legal problems and the site losing multiple domain names to seizure (hence why slimgur is now sli.mg). Creators receive constant legal and death threats. It also suffers from being a free service with staggering bandwidth requirements, so personal funding dries up quickly. Many advertisers do not want to associate with the site. They try to sell t-shirts, and resort to gofundme and other means. Anyone who has ever been there knows how well that works.​

1.5 Years Ago

Ellen Pao, interim CEO of Reddit, bans FPH, despite it being one of the most popular subreddits on the entire website. This causes an incredible backlash that makes national headlines, where the entire front page of Reddit is covered in Swastikas, and where Pao takes an unbelievable amount of flak, earning the nickname "Chairman Pao" or "Pao Zedong" which is still a common epithet for her whenever she's mentioned online:

ellen-pao-the-mao-of-reddit.jpg


FPH's offshoots are eventually quashed reddit-wide after creating hundreds of splinter subs, and the group is forced to relocate to VOAT, a Reddit rival with an infinitesimal fraction of its Alexa ranking and which works on the policy of "absolutely no censorship." As a result, it has attracted fringe communities, and is a hub for white supremacists and a number of other unsavory elements. As you might imagine, this was not good for slimgur and, if the story ended there, it might have folded or become a "hobby" website.

As an interesting aside, banning FPH essentially ends Ellen Pao's tenure at Reddit. There is debate about whether she was brought it explicitly to be a scape-goat to Reddit's strongly anti-censorship base in the banning of a lot of undesirable subreddits (r/n**gers was also banned during this time) to make the site more palatable to advertisers.​

5 Months Ago


Slimgur, beset by problems, is suddenly recommended as the official image host of a small but explosively growing subreddit which is also suffering from censorship issues with imgur and reddit-The_Donald. There is an (unconfirmed) rumor that CisWhiteMaelstrom, one of the original founders of The_Donald and the one most proximately responsible for its rise to prominence, was given a stake in Sli.mg for promoting the site. While imgur is not banned, a bot warns users who post from imgur, and members tend to chime in reminding their base to use Sli.mg whenever possible. In this way, sli.mg comes back from exile on VOAT to be part of Reddit again.​

3 Months Ago

The_Donald is growing at an alarming rate and is now the second most active community on the entire website, dominating the front page in a manner completely disproportionate to their user base. Reddit Co-Founders Ohanian and Huffman authorize a change to Reddit's sorting algorithm, and while other explanations are given, the clear reason is to limit the number of posts reaching the front page from The_Donald. As a result, lots of weird porn ends up reaching very high vote counts (which, to me, suggests just how badly Reddit wanted The_Donald to disappear, since that weird porn is now on their front page, the first thing users see if they arrive from the media, etc.). During this time, Sli.mg is being absolutely crushed by traffic, and goes down frequently. They get into a dangerous situation where people start making noise about abandoning the platform because of outages.​

Two Months Ago
r/The_Donald first recognizes that Slimgur is "valued" at over a million dollars. In their second big "break" of this adventure, they happen to be the pet project of one of the very, very few subreddits that isn't ruthlessly anti-capitalist, so rather than engaging in a witch hunt, they congratulate the company.
Today

The_Donald is larger and more popular than ever, and sli.mg seems to have found advertisers to support it. While I doubt it's worth the $71M valuation that those website value calculators put on it, it is certainly worth millions. They're still in a precarious spot because they're often used to post legal-but-undesirable content vs. their competition, so their traffic is probably MASSIVELY less valuable than it would be if it was more general (for the same reason that a porn host with 20,000,000 hits a month is worth a fraction of what a fitness blog with 20,000,000 hits a month is). But no doubt, they've made a name for themselves, and are, I'm sure, making some real money. Quicker than a 9-5? Sure. But it wasn't easy, either.​
 
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Fox

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Without getting political there is huge amounts of change in the wind. This election season, and other events, are creating huge amounts of censorship, either real or perceived, across all the main platforms. Movies like Snowden, events in Europe, the US elections etc are all creating a huge need for platforms free from censorship, interference and that are also somewhat secure/anonymous (don't get fired for posting your views).

Millions are very unhappy with Twitter, FB, Google etc. Many are ready to jump but they just need a viable alternative.
 
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RHL

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Millions are very unhappy with Twitter, FB, Google etc. Many are ready to jump but they just need a viable alternative.

Absolutely. Also, a customer service-focused and functionally similar competitor to YouTube and Ebay could take those sites out like week-old garbage as well. But I agree with @MJ_Demarco , Twitter is the most ripe for conquest. Their stock is plummeting as well.
 
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MJ DeMarco

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Millions are very unhappy with Twitter, FB, Google etc. Many are ready to jump but they just need a viable alternative.

Yup.

I've been licking my chops at the tremendous opportunities out there based on what's been happening with these supposedly "objective" services, not to mention the media. If I was young and willing to go full-blown CHUMA mode, I would definitely be in this space.

Someone's gonna make a killing -- and it really doesn't matter who wins the election.

Right now, I think an alt-Twitter is the best opportunity, assuming you can land a big influencer to hop aboard early.
 

nradam123

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Yup.

I've been licking my chops at the tremendous opportunities out there based on what's been happening with these supposedly "objective" services, not to mention the media. If I was young and willing to go full-blown CHUMA mode, I would definitely be in this space.

Someone's gonna make a killing -- and it really doesn't matter who wins the election.

Right now, I think an alt-Twitter is the best opportunity, assuming you can land a big influencer to hop aboard early.

Alternative as in a replica? There are many already out there.
 
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Guest34764

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If you can get a few influential figures who have been banned from Twitter (re: MiloY) to grass-roots the launch, you'd be creating some great momentum and an instant base. The trouble in these new services is always the launch and creating a base that can virally spawn.

It would need more than just Milo.

Twitter is killing itself, however the wounds aren't that deep.

A few big speakers have been banned but they're not that much.The wounds need to be deeper in order for this to happen, and I suspect it will happen soon.

Watch out for twitter because it will happen.
 

RHL

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It would need more than just Milo.

I think the trick is that it has to cater, substantively, to Milo's audience, but that can't be its raison d'être. The reason why VOAT didn't explode even though many Reddit users (especially its content creators) are extremely dissatisfied by it is that it initially catered to racists and people banned from Reddit, so it became "that place where racists and bullies go." What it needs to do is convincingly court users by caring about privacy, free speech, and general user feedback, but not let those become shibboleths for "protecting racism" or something, in the popular consciousness (and some people will wise up to this immediately and start trying to tar them with that brush).

The next twitter needs to be for Milo and his fans, but it needs to court the libertarian/centrist conservative and liberal audience first, the Trey Parkers and Rand Pauls of the world. Then it will be able to pose a true challenge instead of being a niche upstart.
 

ApparentHorizon

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You also have people like Assange coming out with threats of starting another Twitter. Maybe get Snowden on board as well.

Question is...

How are you going to leverage these hotspots of virality, if they're actively being censored? - FB, TWTR and Reddit, hell, even Google.
  • Niche communities - like the slimgur case? (There's one called uncensored news on Reddit, maybe team up with them?)
  • Try to come in under the radar?
  • Go viral so fast they can't stop you?
 
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MitchC

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If you are interested in doing this please read the last section of 7 Steps to Freedom II, it's the authors life story in business, keep in mind too it was written a long time before conspiracy videos on Youtube. Yes we need this, but there's safer ways to get rich.
 

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