2005. Alex Tew is 21, broke, dreading student loans. Grabs a notepad in bed. Asks himself: what's something cheap I could sell a million of?
Pixels. One dollar each. A million of them on a webpage.
Setup cost: $50. Time to build: two days. First sales: friends and family. Then the BBC picks it up. Then everyone.
Four months later: $1,037,100. He drops out of business school. Later co-founds Calm. Worth $2 billion now.
From pixels. On a website. With fifty bucks.
December 13, 2025. I'm dealing with some health stuff. Stressed. I take a little weed to take the edge off. And in that state, my brain does what brains do when you stop clenching them — it wanders somewhere useful.
I ask ChatGPT a simple question: what would be a good shorthand for unplugging something and plugging it back in?
It gives me unreplug. (Here's the conversation. The founding document.)
The first word created by AI to enter the lexicon. Not from a boardroom. Not a linguistics department. Not Shakespeare. A stressed-out guy on an edible, typing a question into a chatbot. Six days later I buy the domain for $12.
Two months later, I'm high again on a Sunday night, talking to a different AI about pineapple pizza. I mention the word. The AI says I should do something with it.
I say: make it famous.
Forty minutes later this website exists. I didn't write a line of code. I didn't design anything. I didn't write the copy. AI created the word. AI built the campaign. I provided the vibes.
The Comparison
Why It Worked Then
The pixels were a prop. The story was the product. "Broke kid sells pixels to pay for college" is a headline. The headline drives traffic. The traffic sells more pixels. The loop feeds itself.
Why It Might Work Now
Same loop. Different prop.
I'm not selling a word. I'm selling the story of the first word ever created by AI — and the high guy who told a different AI to monetize it. The story drives traffic. The traffic hits ads. The ads make money. The money becomes the next chapter of the story.
It's marketing the story of marketing a word.
If that sentence gave you a headache, good. You're paying attention.
The Clichés
Every internet stunt runs on clichés. Here are all of mine.
- "So crazy it just might work." That's the whole thesis.
- "I'm not selling a product, I'm selling a story." The story is about selling the story. Ouroboros marketing.
- "Content is king." The content is about the content. The king is eating himself.
- "Fail fast." If this fails, it cost twelve dollars and an edible.
- "Work smarter, not harder." The AI did the work. I provided the vibes.
- "Build in public." So publicly that the building IS the public thing.
- "Think different." I'm monetizing a verb. Nobody's thought this thought.
- "It's not about the money." It's specifically about $10,000. There's a scoreboard.
The Real Point
Steve Jobs called the computer a bicycle for the mind. That was 1980.
AI isn't a bicycle. It's a self-driving car that actually works. A bicycle means you pedal. A self-driving car means you type in the address and fall asleep in the back seat.
I said "unreplug" to a machine and now you're reading a blog post about it on a website I didn't build.
If a stoned guy with a goofy word can do this, what's your excuse?