#internet

Spend enough time reading about startups and it's easy to come away with the impression that success means conquering the world.

Millions of users. Billion-dollar valuations. Products everyone has heard of.

Those stories are fascinating, but they also distort our intuition.

Imagine you build an online service that people find genuinely useful. Not revolutionary. Not something that dominates headlines. Just something that solves a real problem well enough that people are happy to pay $8 per month.

Now imagine that 10,000 people subscribe.

That's:

\[ 10,\!000 \times \$8 = \$80,\!000 \text{ per month} \]

or

\[ \$960,\!000 \text{ per year} \]

before expenses.

Those numbers aren't remarkable.

The surprising part is how few people they represent.

With a world population of roughly 8.2 billion, 10,000 customers amount to about

\[ \frac{10,\!000}{8.2\times10^9}\times100\% \approx0.00012\% \]

of humanity.

That is about one person out of every 820,000.

Think about that for a moment.

The internet often feels crowded because we can see everyone at once. Social media places millions of people in the same feed, making it seem as though our work must compete with all of them.

In reality, very few businesses are trying to serve everyone.

The most resilient ones often serve a particular group extraordinarily well.

Maybe they're musicians who need better notation software.

Maybe they're birdwatchers.

Maybe they're language learners.

Out of curiosity, I typed musician.org into my browser, expecting perhaps an old directory, a parked domain, or nothing interesting at all. Instead, it redirected me to a Spotify link for “Crush,” a punk-styled pop song by D’Arcy.

The song itself is enjoyable, though not exactly a famous internet landmark. D’Arcy has a modest Spotify following, which makes the redirect feel even stranger. Why would such a clean, broad domain name point to one particular track by a relatively small artist? Is it promotion? A joke? An old experiment? A forgotten configuration? Some private logic buried in DNS dust?

Whatever the reason, I liked the feeling it gave me. It reminded me of the early 2000s web, when typing a random domain into a browser could feel like opening an unmarked door. You might find a fan site, a strange personal page, a half-broken business, a directory, a poem, a scam, a guestbook, or something that seemed to exist for no reason except that someone, somewhere, had put it there.

The modern internet often feels more centralized. We do not so much “surf” as circulate through a handful of giant platforms, each with its own rails and recommendation engines. But every once in a while, a plain old domain name still behaves like a loose floorboard. You step on it, and suddenly you’re somewhere oddly specific.

That little surprise is probably the real story here. Not the song, exactly. Not even the domain. Just the reminder that the web still has corners.