It is easy to forget that the big popular sites were once small too.
The first version of Digg cost $200 to build and launch.
After Kevin Rose came up with the idea back in 2004 he found Owen Byrne through eLance to develop the idea. He was paying $99/month for webhosting and got the domain name for $1,200. A few months later he launched the site with an announcement on his blog. This is what it looked like.
Here’s another one that should look familiar – Amazon.com. Things have changed a bit since then!
And how could I write an article like this without mentioning twttr (now known as Twitter, I’m @rosshill). Dom posted a really insightful story of Twitter’s founding moments over at the 140 characters blog and shared this photo of what an early version looked like.
I have also shared some of the sketches I used to create my new coverhunt cd search site.
Have you got the next million-dollar idea? Head over to RentACoder or eLance and make it happen.
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