From Hot Concept to Hot Site in Eight Days
By James Hong
AmIHotOrNot.com evolved from an idea into one of the biggest sites on the Web in less than two months. Such rapid growth meant the site had to scale quickly, especially in the first eight days.
It all started the evening of October 3, 2000, when I was sitting in my living room sharing a few beers with my roommate, Jim Young, and my brother, Tony. Jim had just mentioned that he thought a girl we had met at a party was a perfect "10," when the idea suddenly came to me: "Wouldn't it be funny to have a Web site where you could rate random pictures of people from 1 to 10?"
For lack of anything better to do, we kept talking about it. We built the site in our heads, arguing over what kind of functionality the site would have, designing the user interface, and deciding on the details. After three hours, we had a whiteboard with a Web-site layout drawn on it and a burning desire to build the site.
We also had the time. I was unemployed and working on an online resource for Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) developers, called XMethods.net, with my brother. Jim was an electrical engineering grad student at the University of California at Berkeley. Because the concept was so simple, the site took only a couple of days to build.
Keep It Simple
After hours of arguing over the Web-site design, the whiteboard had only three pages on it: one page where people voted on the appearance of others; another where people submitted their own pictures; and a final page where people viewed their own rating.
