August 10, 2026
Dot-com dreams, sticker-chart chaos
Felix and I
Two friends chased internet riches by cloning shopping sites — and the comments got very emotional
TLDR: The article recalls two friends trying to build hundreds of shopping clone sites and get rich before 30, capturing a sweaty, hopeful slice of the early internet. Readers were split between calling it a charming hustle and roasting it as glorified spam, with nostalgia and jokes carrying the thread.
This wasn’t just a story about two young dreamers sweating through a brutal summer and trying to become millionaires before 30. In the comments, readers turned Felix and I into a full-on internet group therapy session about ambition, friendship, and the gloriously weird early web. The big mood? Equal parts "this is so touching" and "wow, this business plan was absolutely cursed." People were obsessed with the image of the tiny fan losing a fight with the heat, the oversized computer case ruining the sleek build, and the giant board with 100 circles waiting to become money-making websites. For many, it felt less like startup lore and more like a coming-of-age film for nerds with delusions of e-commerce grandeur.
The hottest debate was over the scheme itself: was this clever hustle, harmless early-internet scrappiness, or basically search-engine spam in a nice nostalgic wrapper? Some commenters praised the sheer grind of building site after site by hand, saying the article perfectly captured a lost era when a little coding skill could open strange doors. Others roasted the whole thing as "weaponized clutter for Google" and joked that the true protagonist was adhesive tape. And yes, the humor got delightfully unserious: readers compared the sticker board to a toddler chore chart for future tycoons, called the huge computer tower a metaphor for every compromised dream, and laughed at domain names like discountboatshoes.com sounding like side quests from a 2010 fever dream. The result: nostalgia, secondhand embarrassment, and a lot of people loudly missing their own failed internet empires.
Key Points
- •The article recounts how the author and Felix pursued an affiliate-marketing business built on large numbers of niche e-commerce websites.
- •Their model used merchant product datafeeds to generate clone storefronts designed to rank above the original merchant sites on Google.
- •Each successful site reportedly earned about $100 per year, so the strategy depended on producing many low-cost sites at scale.
- •The author built a platform to streamline site creation, but each site still required manual cleanup of datafeeds and manual product categorization.
- •To sustain momentum, the pair tracked a target of 100 sites on a Bristol board and launched domains including decorcurtains.com, scrapbookstarter.com, beddingforcribs.com, and discountboatshoes.com.