The $100 Page

Why I Built This

This project began for a personal reason.

It had no business goal. No product intention. No experiment framework. No message to communicate—at least not at the beginning.

The objective was simpler than that.

I needed to build something. Not something useful. Not something strategic. Something imperfect.

The real goal was to break a habit: the habit of only building when there's a clear purpose, a clear outcome, or a clear optimization. That's the goal—not the reason I wanted to break this habit.

So I built something without justification.

What I Built

A landing page with a single action: Pay $100.

No explanation. No description. No promise. No reason. Just the decision.

At the beginning, it wasn't even real. The payment button did nothing.

And I didn't publish it publicly. I sent the link privately to a few people.

Then Something Unexpected Happened

Analytics showed that two people tried to pay for real.

At that moment, there were only two options:

Leave it fake. Or make it real.

I made it real.

Keeping the ambiguity

The rule didn’t change.

There was still no explanation.

If someone wanted to pay, they had to decide without knowing why.

The idea was simple:

If there is no reason given, the only way forward is to think.

To interpret.

To ask what might be behind it.

To decide whether the uncertainty itself could hide value.

Since real attempts existed, I implemented a real mechanism behind the page distributing an NFT as a pass for 15 min of consulting with me, because I am not a scammer. If it is hard to see that I do not match the pattern, your radar is broken.

Then I added another layer.

A hidden easter egg in the code explaining that I would send $100 to anyone who discovered the real reason the site existed.

What actually happened

Later, the page became public. Some people criticized it. Some laughed. Some offered advice about lowering the price to increase conversions.

Very few investigated.

Even when hints suggested something deeper.

Even when the ambiguity itself was the signal.

Nobody asked (not even a single time) why they should pay me.

What This Showed

This project wasn't built to prove anything. It was built to exist.

But once it existed, something became clear: when there's no explanation and no reassurance, most people stop.

Not because there's no value—because ambiguity blocks action.

You'd think something so unusual might signal hidden value. No one saw it that way.

Conclusion

We can all agree that people perceive value differently. But in an era where people fear that children will lose their critical thinking because of AI, they seem to have forgotten they've already lost their own.

Small critical thinking exercise

• Search my name on ChatGPT—assess whether I have something to offer and when.
• Play the journey in your head:
  • You pay me and you're unsatisfied, even after my consulting. So you ask for a refund. What do you think I'll answer? You know my name and my address... Do you think having trouble with someone is worth $100 to me?
  • You pay me and you're satisfied—you just took an interstellar shortcut and got invaluable feedback.

The only way I would have kept your money, is because you want it that way.

Go in depth with the real reason behind the project exists

Finding the actual reason was almost impossible. The first thing you'd have to fight is the automatic belief that I built it for external reasons rather than internal ones.

Humans have biases, and it's interesting to see how LLMs simply imitate them. If you think about it, a robot with no bias and no emotion would start the analysis this way:

• People do projects for a reason.
• The reason can be either personal or professional.

"Professional" is deeper than simply professional because professional includes personal. But purely personal means the goal is reached the moment it goes online and becomes accessible regardless of what happens next. The money, the analytics, the messages, the comments, the reactions, all of that are side effects, not part of the goal.

But people and LLMs struggle to think that a public project was made for personal reasons. It's not intuitive to assume that publication is the end, a "letting go." So by not being a robot and automatically choosing that the reason is professional, you could give 42 million reasons why the project was built, all doomed to fail. Interesting, no?

At this point, even with this explanation, I still think it's impossible to find. I tried with ChatGPT, with the full personal context, and it didn't manage within 20 rounds. It's impossible to prove, but I think in the opposite situation I would have managed to find it, which gives me a valuable and unique hint about LLM capabilities and their limits.