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Comment by tempestn | Hacker News Reader

If not for this guy, my life would probably have been totally different. It's silly, but the Million Dollar Homepage was definitely one of the motivating factors that got me into web development. After seeing his page I had every intention of making some ridiculous, gimmicky advertising ratings site or something and making millions of dollars with ease. Then I decided it would make sense to get some experience first, before I dove right into it, so I decided to make a simple little tool for my own use first. THEN I'd make the "real" site (ie the doomed gimmick site). Turns out my throwaway test idea was actually useful to people though, and it grew into an actual business that I'm still running 10 years later.

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That's amazing. What's the actual business?

It's in his profile: http://www.searchtempest.com/

Ha, ya, although I left out the get-rich-quick aspirations in my profile!

At the time I was a poor grad student and was shopping for a portable AC unit to survive the summer in my sweltering apartment. There were about 5 craigslist sites within driving distance, and I was checking all of them, since saving 20 bucks was easily worth an extra hour of driving at that point. :) Figured a simple thing to learn some basics would be a page that would just spit out the links to multiple craigslist results pages matching a given search.

I literally went to the library and got a book called something like, "Basic web development using PHP and MySQL". The initial site was... very basic. Before I made it I'd looked around for existing solutions, and so when it was done I replied to the few forum threads I'd found, where people were looking for the same thing. It basically grew organically from there. (And over time I made it somewhat less basic. Although the design is looking pretty dated at this point; we're currently working hard on a long-overdue responsive redesign.)

A couple years later I made (an early version of) http://www.autotempest.com, which is like kayak.com for used cars. Then around 2009 I quit my day job and hired my first employee. Have been doing this ever since.

I stumbled across AutoTempest while doing some research to see whether or not auto search aggregators were popular here in the U.S. I was planning on creating a similar service for my home country, but grad school has started and I'm having less and less time :(

Anyways, keep up the awesome work, and I'm glad it has all worked out for you!

This is incredible, I've been using your site for 5 years and I've always wondered "i wonder how much this site profits per month"

Any way I can get this half decade long question answered? :)

Glad you like the site! It makes enough that I can keep investing in improvements, while support my family comfortably and saving for a rainy day.

I've always wondered who created that site. I've used it to search for cars and parts for years! Thanks! :)

Sounds like it must be 6 figures per year, congrats.

In case anyone else was curious, so far 766 people have clicked that link (over the past ~9 hours). (The AutoTempest one I buried at the end of my other reply has 106 so far.) Quite a bit more than I expected, given that this story only has 200 upvotes or so, and I'm sure only a small fraction of viewers would click the link. A lot of HN lurkers out there!

The more hostile the environment, the more lurkers there are. I read HN daily, but never comment because if you don't speak what the hivemind likes, they downvote you.

I haven't read any of your other comments, but it sort of seems like you're inviting the hostility with this one.

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