# The Dodo Digest: Small Ideas Can Get Very Big > Outbid.lol turned a 3-hour build into $220K and a million visitors. Why small ideas scale, plus v1.113.6: subscription pause, PPP, and Charm Pricing. - **Author**: Rishabh Goel - **Published**: 2026-09-07 - **Category**: Newsletter - **URL**: https://dodopayments.com/blogs/newsletter-september7 --- ### TL;DR - Outbid.lol turned a ridiculously simple idea, paying to move higher on a public leaderboard, into one of the most talked-about indie launches of the week. - The interesting lesson isn't that every founder should build a leaderboard. It's that small, creative ideas can create enormous outcomes when they solve a problem in a way people haven't seen before. - Outbid also highlights something founders often underestimate: when a product suddenly takes off, your payment infrastructure needs to be ready before the attention arrives. - That's a big part of what we care about at Dodo: making payments quick to integrate, easy to manage, and fast to get live. - We also shipped [Dodo Payments v1.113.6](https://docs.dodopayments.com/changelog/v1.113.6), with improvements focused on making the platform more reliable and easier to work with. Hello everyone, Every once in a while, a tiny product shows up on the internet and makes you question what we actually mean when we say something is a "big" product. That happened to me this week when I came across Outbid.lol. If you haven't seen it yet, the idea is almost comically simple. You put your product, website, or profile on a public leaderboard and pay to move higher. If you're sitting at number three and someone wants your spot, they simply pay more than you did. If you want to get back above them, you outbid them again. That's pretty much the entire product. And yet, Jonathan Wilke, the founder behind Outbid, reportedly built it in around 3 hours. Within 48 hours, the site had crossed a million visitors and more than $120K in bids. By the end of its first week, the public revenue counter had crossed $200K, and current trackers put it at more than $220K. For a project that started as a tiny experiment, that's pretty wild. What I found more interesting than the revenue, though, was why it worked. The Outbid.lol landing page, showing the tagline "No ads, no API keys, no revenue sharing. Just claim a rank to get to the top." ## The Signal Outbid is a good reminder that sometimes the most interesting products are the ones that make you think: "Wait, that's it?" There are no hundreds of features to explain. No complicated onboarding flow. No long product tour. You land on the page and immediately understand what is happening: there is a leaderboard, there are products on it, and if you want to move up, you have to pay more. That simplicity created something much more interesting than a normal leaderboard: competition. Every new bid changes the page. Someone takes the top spot, someone else wants it back, and suddenly the amount sitting at number one becomes part of the story. A $20 bid isn't particularly interesting. A $1,000 bid is. A $10,000 bid makes you stop and ask why someone would spend that much. And then people screenshot it, post it, discuss it, and send more people to the site. The product essentially created its own distribution loop. That's what I think is worth paying attention to. A lot of founders think about distribution as something that happens after you build the product. You build something, then figure out SEO, ads, social media, partnerships, or some other way to get people to discover it. Outbid blurred those two things together. The thing people were buying was also the thing everyone else was watching. And that's why the project became much bigger than the amount of code behind it. A post from MakerThrive reporting that $42 spent on Outbid.lol drove 64,000 visitors and $29K in one day, with a traffic analytics dashboard ## Why This Matters We're living in a time where building software is becoming incredibly cheap and fast. The advantage isn't always having the biggest team or the most funding. Sometimes it's simply noticing a problem and trying to solve it in a way nobody else has. That's what makes Outbid interesting. It didn't invent auctions, leaderboards, or competition. It just combined them into something simple enough to understand instantly and interesting enough that people wanted to share it. Of course, simplicity alone doesn't create a $200K+ business. Timing, distribution, novelty, and a bit of luck all played a role. But the lesson isn't to build the next Outbid. It's to keep experimenting. The idea that feels too small might be the one worth trying. And when something does take off, the infrastructure underneath it suddenly matters a lot. You can have hundreds of thousands of people visiting your product, but if customers can't actually pay, you've got a problem. That's why Outbid.lol using Dodo Payments is particularly exciting for us. We care deeply about making payments quick to integrate and getting founders live without making them spend weeks building payment infrastructure. When your product takes off, payments shouldn't be the thing slowing it down. A post announcing that Outbid.lol is live on Dodo Payments, quoting the founder's earlier request for help moving payment providers at short notice ## What We Shipped That same focus on removing friction is reflected in [Dodo Payments v1.113.6](https://docs.dodopayments.com/changelog/v1.113.6). One of the bigger updates is [Subscription Pause & Resume](https://docs.dodopayments.com/changelog/v1.113.6#1-subscription-pause-%26-resume). Merchants can now pause or resume subscriptions directly from the dashboard, while customers can do the same from the Customer Portal when enabled. Businesses can also choose whether usage-based subscriptions should be billed for outstanding usage when a subscription is paused. We also introduced native [Purchasing Power Parity (PPP)](https://docs.dodopayments.com/changelog/v1.113.6#2-purchasing-power-parity), allowing businesses to set different price percentages for individual countries directly from Dodo. Products can opt into PPP individually, making it easier to adapt pricing to different markets without relying on third-party tools. Alongside that, we shipped: - **[Charm Pricing](https://docs.dodopayments.com/changelog/v1.113.6#3-charm-pricing)**, with configurable rounding rules to turn converted prices into more familiar price points. - **[Archive Businesses & Brands](https://docs.dodopayments.com/changelog/v1.113.6#4-archive-businesses-%26-brands)**, giving merchants a way to cleanly archive businesses they no longer operate, subject to the required eligibility checks. - **[Milestones](https://docs.dodopayments.com/changelog/v1.113.6#5-milestones)**, a new dashboard experience that tracks achievements across geography, revenue, growth, and customers, with shareable milestone cards. - **[A guided setup experience](https://docs.dodopayments.com/changelog/v1.113.6#6-a-guided-setup-experience)** that brings onboarding into one place, saves progress, and lets merchants copy products from test mode to live. We also made a breaking change to how subscription pausing works through the API. The old `pause` field has been removed and replaced with the `status` field, giving integrations a clearer way to pause and resume subscriptions. If you are still sending `pause`, that call now fails with a `422`, so update those calls before upgrading. A lot of these updates are about different parts of the payment experience, but they share the same goal: make it easier for founders to launch, operate, and grow without having to build all of this infrastructure themselves. The Dodo Payments Charm Pricing configuration table, showing a rounding step for each price range ## One Last Thought The thing I like most about the Outbid story is that it makes building feel exciting again. It's easy to get caught up in the idea that every startup needs to be a massive platform with dozens of integrations and years of development behind it. Then something like Outbid comes along. A developer spends a few hours building a strange little idea, puts it on the internet, and suddenly hundreds of thousands of people are watching it. That doesn't mean every three-hour project is going to make $200K. It does mean we should probably spend less time worrying about whether an idea is big enough and more time asking whether it's interesting enough to try. Build the small thing. Try the weird idea. Solve the problem differently. You never really know what will happen until you put it in front of people. Also, join our loving [Discord community](https://discord.gg/dodo-payments-1305511580854779984)! Best, **Rishabh Goel** **Co-Founder, Dodo Payments** --- - [More Newsletter articles](https://dodopayments.com/blogs/category/newsletter) - [All articles](https://dodopayments.com/blogs)