How Hannah Montana taught me to Dig Deeper

The year was 2007. MySpace was the number one social network in America. Hannah Montana was emerging as one of Disney’s most commercially successful franchises. Incredibly, the top ranked Google result for “MySpace Hannah Montana” was my own CoolChaser. That brought in thousands of users a day to my site, which made well over $100,000/month in advertising.

How did an unhip 40-something Chinese immigrant who is clueless about American culture, let alone teen sub-culture and who didn’t even have a MySpace account come to develop and run a site like CoolChaser?

It all started when friends and I had the idea to create a social search engine. We aggregated search results from then prominent search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask Jeeves. If a search result was ranked by more than one search engine, that result got bumped up. Users could also upvote and comment on the results.

It was a dud. We needed users badly to kickstart the social voting process. I was looking for ways to get users and finally convinced my good friend who owns the domain “url.com” to let me use the domain for this meta social search engine. 

URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator, the nerdy term for the common web address. As the web became ubiquitous, url.com received thousands of visitors a day. We were finally getting some usage. Alas, it wasn’t near enough users for such a broad application like search. For any random keyword, the chances of a search result getting a comment or a vote was tiny.  But I noticed in a very narrow domain, we were gaining a lot of traction. That domain was centered around “myspace layouts and backgrounds”!

So, I began burrowing through the rabbit hole of why we were attracting these MySpace users and what on earth were they actually looking for? After many a dead-end, I finally stumbled upon the MySpace user settings page, and saw this little form:

Hopefully, the (simulated) screenshot gives you retro vibes! To the MySpace developers, this form was obviously asking users to enter the web address (URL) of the image that users wanted for their profile page background. But many users had no clue what this meant.

Back in these glorious MySpace days, users who wanted their profile pages to have a pink border, or to have cute little hearts floating around were actually expected to paste in actual HTML code!

This led me to the realization that there was a huge demand from MySpace users to customize their profiles but few users had the technical know-how to fulfill their desires. 

We quickly came up with a browser extension that allowed users to customize their profiles via just a few simple clicks. We redirected our search engine to look for images or backgrounds that users had an affinity to (like Hannah Montana). We created templates for users to customize and claim as their own. Finally, we converted all these choices into HTML code and inserted these codes into MySpace on behalf of the user automagically.

I like to tell this story whenever I am asked how to come up with a startup idea. I don’t think you need to come up with a fantastic idea to start with, but you have to be prepared to dig deeper.

Tech has been hot for decades but I know there are more opportunities today than ever. However, the surface opportunities have been picked clean. The obvious ideas are also the ones that Big Tech have pounced on and have deployed a ton of resources. As a tiny startup, you don’t have much of a chance.

Before CoolChaser, I unsuccessfully moved on from one obvious idea to the next. After CoolChaser, I realized while the obvious opportunities have been monopolized away, there are riches available. We just have to take a more convoluted path. And strangely, most people prefer to look “under the street lamp” where everyone else is looking rather than dig their own unique path.

There is a nuance to digging deeper. You can’t stubbornly follow a path that you had planned out at the surface. The first idea usually doesn’t pan out. But that doesn’t mean you give up. You have to do the work and get actual empirical results and try to figure out why it didn’t work out. With our social search engine, we knew we needed more users - and I creatively persuaded my friend to loan me url.com.

Perhaps even more important than trying to figure out what went wrong, or how to improve your product, is to always be on the lookout for surprises. We all have mental models about how things work. When we encounter a surprise, it’s often a signal that our mental model is wrong.

By 2007, there were already a ton of sites that catered to MySpace users looking for layouts - it was an obvious idea if you were an avid MySpace user or a teenager. Many of these sites were enormously popular and the top few were probably making millions a year in advertising. But the sites were very similar in that they all provided specific HTML codes for a specific design tied to a specific pop artist like Madonna. And you then had to copy this code and figure out where to paste it on your MySpace settings page. 

If we had just cloned one of these sites, we wouldn’t have gotten anywhere. But because of the convoluted path we took, as MySpace neophytes, we came up with an entirely different approach. By serendipitously stumbling on this opportunity via url.com, we realized that users were extremely frustrated with the whole “pasting html codes” process. And when we looked deeper at our search engine logs to see what our users were looking for, we realized they were intensely interested in the latest trends and fashions that they could call their own. 

With teenagers always chasing the latest “cool” (in 2007, that was Hannah Montana), our unconventional journey propelled us to the top 3 in our strange but still very competitive market of MySpace customizations.

In a recent David Perell podcast, Steph Smith observed there are 8 billion people. If you want to write about any topic, someone, somewhere has probably written about it already. The same can be said about startup ideas.

We are all mimetic lemmings in a sense. It’s ok to start out with a derivative or trendy idea. Whatever gets your juices flowing. The important thing is to start building something. As in writing, “imitate, then innovate”

But when what you build collides with reality, be open. Be ready to get dirty digging down rabbit holes. Jump on surprises. Reflect on why what you planned didn’t work. Just by building, you become more attune to what the universe is telling you. There may be 8 billion of us, but everyone can dig our own path. Once I started digging deeper, I started differentiating from everyone else. That’s when I started uncovering unique yet useful insights. So, dig deeper and prosper!

Thanks to @blweaver,

Matt Joass

Harrison Moore

AnneMarie Bell

Hannah Gibson

Garima Mamgain

for the helpful feedback and encouragement and especially

Rick Lewis

for teaching me the power of storytelling