Do Nothing For 2 Minutes - how the 2-minutes relaxing website attracted 2M users within 10 days (6 min read)
Do Nothing For 2 Minutes- Is a website that asks you to do nothing, just relax and listen to waves for 2 minutes.
If you touch your mouse or keyboard within those 2 minutes, you fail.
This website ultimately led its founder to create Calm.com
Strategy & Tools
Highlights
- January 20, 2011 - Alex Tew (The Million Dollar Homepage guy) created a website called DoNothingFor2Minutes.com, and tweeted about it.
- 20 hours after the launch - The website reached 20k unique users.
- January 20-30, 2011 - The website received a lot of press.
- January 30, 2011 - The website reached 2M visits.
- July 2020 - After 9 years DoNothingFor2Minutes.com website still attracts more than 120k visitors per month, out of which 88% is organic.
Seeding
Alex sent just 1 tweet, from his tweeter account.
Though, Alex didn't have a huge following (today, August 2020, he has 20k followers) 10 retweets were enough to make this website go viral.
Simplicity
DoNothingFor2Minutes was a 1-page website with with a timer, peaceful sunset in a background, and a sounds of wave.
All user needed to do was to do not move the mouse or keyboard.
Friction-free start of the challenge
When you entered the website, the timer was already running.
You almost immediately "lost", because of the lack of knowledge of the rules of this challenge.
CTA - Call To Action
After you won the challenge, the CTA buttons encouraged you to share the website via Twitter or Facebook.
Psychology
Challenge
For most people, there is something unexplainably compelling about the nature of competition. Some scientists argue, “competitiveness” is a biological trait that co-evolved with the basic need for survival.
There are 2 types of motivations in challenges:
- External (e.g. rewards) - works for short-term goals
- Internal (e.g. desire to be healthy) - works for the long-term goals
DoNothingFor2Minutes provided those 2 motivations right with the CTA button.
Comedy
The website is absurd! That's why it's funny.
The incongruity theory of humor suggests that we find fundamentally incompatible concepts or unexpected resolutions funny.
Basically, we find humor in the incongruity between our expectations and reality.
Timing
For the last 10 years we've been living in a crazy, fast-paced, short attention spam world. And it doesn't seem to get any better soon.
That's why this website made sense then, and after 9 years it still makes sense today.
Window of Opportunity
Alex's method to collect tons of leads for your product, with a side viral campaign
1. Build something that's more viral than your actual product - It should be somehow related to your product, but in an outside the box, absurdity theme - it works best for virality
2. Don't spend more than 2 days to build it.
3. Promote - social media, journalists, influencer marketing.
4. Drive traffic to your main product or collect emails
Get your
"oh sh*t, this might work for us!"
moment in the next 5 minutes
Viral marketing case studies and marketing psychology principles that made hundreds of millions in months or weeks
In the first email:
- a step-by-step strategy that made $0-$30M within 9 weeks with $0 marketing budget (case study)
- cheatsheet (PDF) of 10 biases in marketing used by top 2% companies
Other than that:
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