I wanted to build something that was deliberately simple.
Not another SaaS dashboard.
Not another AI wrapper.
Not another productivity app.
Something that could exist on the internet simply because it was interesting.
So I built THE MILLION.
The idea
THE MILLION contains 1,000,000 spots that people can claim.
Each spot costs $2.
Once someone claims a spot, they can associate their identity, project, brand or message with it.
The interesting part is that every spot also becomes its own shareable page.
So instead of someone simply buying something on a website, they get a small piece of a larger internet experiment.
Why build this?
The inspiration came from the Million Dollar Homepage.
In 2005, Alex Tew created a website containing one million pixels and sold them for $1 each.
The idea became an internet phenomenon.
I kept thinking about the underlying mechanics.
The technology was simple.
The interesting engineering challenge was everything around the simple idea:
How do you make a static-looking concept feel alive?
How do you make every participant part of the product?
How do you make sharing useful?
How do you make every new participant increase the value of the experience for everyone else?
Those questions became the foundation of THE MILLION.
The grid
At the center of the project is the million-spot grid.
It needs to feel immediate.
When someone visits, they should understand what they’re looking at without reading a long explanation.
There are one million possible positions.
Some are claimed.
Most are still available.
As more people participate, the visual itself becomes the progress indicator.
The website changes because the community changes it.
Individual spot pages
One of the most important parts of the system is that a spot isn’t just a square on the main grid.
Every claimed spot has its own URL.
That means a participant can share their spot directly.
Instead of:
“Go to this website and find me.”
They can share:
“I own spot #XXXX.”
This turns every participant into a potential distribution channel.
Social previews
This was another technical problem I wanted to solve properly.
When someone shares their spot URL on platforms such as X, WhatsApp or LinkedIn, the link shouldn’t look like a random URL.
It should communicate what the person is sharing.
The Open Graph metadata generates a preview associated with the individual spot.
That means the spot itself becomes a social object.
Someone sees the preview.
They become curious.
They click.
They discover THE MILLION.
They may eventually claim their own spot.
That’s the loop I’m interested in.
The architecture
The application is built as a modern web application with a focus on:
- A responsive frontend
- Persistent spot data
- Individual spot pages
- Payment processing
- Dynamic Open Graph metadata
- Shareable URLs
- A large grid that can represent 1,000,000 possible positions
The interesting engineering constraint is that a million spots doesn’t mean we should render one million heavy DOM elements and hope for the best.
The interface needs to remain performant while still giving users the feeling that they’re exploring one enormous space.
But the technology isn’t the experiment
That’s probably the most important lesson I’ve learned building it.
I could spend months adding features.
AI.
Leaderboards.
Gamification.
NFTs.
Badges.
Complex profiles.
And completely miss the point.
The original Million Dollar Homepage worked partly because the concept was so easy to understand.
So I’m trying to resist the temptation to make THE MILLION complicated.
The experiment is simple.
Can people become emotionally interested in owning a tiny piece of an internet artifact?
The first milestone
I’m not trying to fill all 1,000,000 spots immediately.
I’m looking for the first 100.
The first people who discover it.
The first developers.
The first founders.
The first creators.
The first curious people who simply think:
“This is weird. I want one.”
Those people matter because they create the beginning of the story.
What happens if it works?
The interesting thing about a project like this is that the product becomes more interesting as more people participate.
100 people is interesting.
1,000 is more interesting.
10,000 becomes a very different website.
100,000 becomes something that starts to resemble a public internet artifact.
At some point, the question stops being:
“Why would anyone buy a spot?”
And becomes:
“How many people are actually part of this?”
That’s the experiment.
I’m building it in public
I don’t know exactly where this will go.
Maybe it becomes huge.
Maybe it becomes a fascinating experiment that only a few hundred people participate in.
Either way, I’m interested in seeing what happens.
Because I think there is still room on the internet for simple ideas.
Not every project needs to solve a massive problem.
Sometimes you can build something simply because you want to find out whether people will care.
That’s what I’m doing.
1,000,000 spots.
$2 each.
One internet experiment.
The first 100 are being claimed now.
Would you take one?
THE MILLION: https://themillion.live
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