IWANNABERICH is a public website that starts from €0, sets a joke-sized goal of €1 billion, and lets anonymous visitors vote on what its unnamed operator tries next with the first €13 raised. Every cost, failure and donation is published. Stripped of the billion-euro framing, it is a small experiment in outsourcing entrepreneurial judgment to a crowd, built on an idea that is older than the web itself.
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The site’s own numbers are almost comically modest next to its name. IWANNABERICH states a long-term goal of €1,000,000,000 and a current mission of reaching its first €100, starting from a real €13 already raised through Stripe donations capped at €10,000 each. Its “about” page, written by an operator who has chosen to stay anonymous until the experiment reaches that billion-euro milestone, describes the whole thing as “one person trying a strange idea in public, before it has enough money to deserve a documentary.” The idea began, according to the site’s own story page, as a conversation with the operator’s brother-in-law about what might happen if a website simply let money “accumulate while the experiment was documented.” What makes IWANNABERICH worth examining is not whether €13 will ever become a billion euros — it almost certainly will not — but the specific mechanism it has built: a public vote that decides what an anonymous person does with their own small pile of money, published costs and failures included, with no equity or financial return offered to anyone who funds it.
A vote replaces a business plan
Most micro-funded projects ask backers to approve a product that already has a plan behind it. IWANNABERICH inverts that order. Its own “experiment” page describes a loop it calls Suggest, Vote, Try, Result: visitors suggest an idea, the community votes, the operator tries whichever idea wins, and the real outcome becomes part of a public record that includes failures. At the time this analysis was prepared, the site’s homepage listed three live options for its current €13 — using the money “to flip something,” building a small digital product to sell, or attempting “a ridiculous internet hustle” — with voting restricted to one ballot per browser, a limit presumably meant to stop a single visitor from stacking the result.
The operator’s own “experiment” page is explicit that the site is not an investment: a visible disclaimer states that support “buys no ownership or share of profits” and that “no financial return is promised.” That framing matters more than it might seem, because it removes IWANNABERICH from the regulatory category that would otherwise apply to a site asking strangers for money toward a for-profit venture. A contribution functions closer to a tip than to a crowdfunding pledge, which is also why the site repeatedly describes donations as “voluntary” and “not refundable” rather than as an investment of any kind.
The loop also does something a conventional business plan cannot: it converts every decision, however small, into a piece of public content in its own right. A founder deciding privately whether to resell an item or build a digital product makes that choice once and moves on. IWANNABERICH turns the same choice into a vote, a result and an update-log entry, which means the decision itself, not just its outcome, becomes something an audience can follow. That is closer to the mechanics of a reality-format show than to a startup pitch, and the site’s own copy leans into that comparison directly by promising that “the real result” will always be published, win or lose.
The milestones are deliberately small
IWANNABERICH’s own milestones page sets out six markers before the site even reaches its stated first target of €100: €5 (“first coffee paid for by the experiment”), €10 (“Okay, this is actually moving”), €25 (“A stranger is genuinely involved”), €50 (“Halfway to the first real target”), and then €100 itself, which the page calls the point where “we figure out €1,000.” The billion-euro figure sits at the far end of that same list as what the about page calls “a wildly optimistic milestone reward” — the operator has stated that reaching it is the one condition under which their identity would be revealed.
That structure, scaling a joke-sized long-term goal down into granular, almost trivial short-term steps, is doing real work. It lets the project claim early, visible wins — a stranger sending a few euros becomes a milestone worth naming in its own right — long before anything resembling the stated goal is remotely plausible. The site’s own updates log, as of its most recent public entry, records that status plainly: “€13 is real. The first €100 is the next test,” alongside a note that the project had by then listed itself on Product Hunt and added support for multiple languages, including French, German, Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese and Arabic alongside the original English and Spanish.
The gap between the fifth milestone and the final one is itself the joke, and the site seems aware of that. Nothing in the milestones page pretends the jump from €100 to €1,000,000,000 is a matter of scaling a proven method; the page simply states, under a heading labelled “Next,” that the plan is “€100. Then €1,000. One ridiculous step at a time.” A reader looking for a credible, step-by-step bridge between those two very different numbers will not find one anywhere on the site, because the site is not actually offering one.
The code behind the curtain is public
Unlike most anonymous internet projects, IWANNABERICH’s entire front-end sits in an open, unlisted-by-default public code repository, which is how several of its mechanics can be verified independently of the site’s own marketing copy. The repository’s single configuration file for the project’s custom domain confirms that the code builds the live iwannaberich.xyz site. Commit messages in that repository show the operator using an AI coding assistant for incremental feature work, including a batch of commits adding a community “idea board” so that visitors can suggest ways to reach the billion-euro goal, routed into a linked discussion forum rather than built as custom infrastructure.
That transparency extends further than most crowdfunded projects are willing to go. The site’s own front page runs on a Supabase backend for its live wealth counter and vote tallying, and its code includes a second, admin-facing contributions tracker alongside the public-facing numbers page — meaning the operator has built themselves the same kind of dashboard a conventional startup founder would use internally, just attached to a project whose explicit premise is that no one involved expects a return.
The repository also shows the project’s own file names doubling as a rough map of its ambitions: alongside the public-facing pages sit an `owner.html`, a `contributors.html`, a `contribution.html` and separate admin pages for community moderation and growth tracking — the scaffolding of a project built to be managed like a small company, even while its public language insists it is closer to a hobby. None of that scaffolding is hidden behind a login wall at the code level; anyone willing to read through the repository can see the shape of the operator’s own back office.
The nearest real precedent sold pixels, not promises
IWANNABERICH’s basic shape — a single person, a public number climbing from zero, strangers paying small amounts to be part of the story — has a well-documented predecessor that long predates crowdfunding platforms. In August 2005, Alex Tew, then a 21-year-old student in Wiltshire, England, launched The Million Dollar Homepage to help pay for his university education, selling a grid of one million pixels at one dollar each so that buyers could place a tiny image or link. Wikipedia’s account of the project records that it raised a gross total of $1,037,100 over roughly five months, with the final 1,000 pixels sold at auction on eBay in January 2006.
Tew’s own project grew almost entirely through word of mouth and press coverage rather than paid promotion, a pattern IWANNABERICH appears to be trying to repeat at a far smaller scale through its own Product Hunt listing and multilingual rollout. Later coverage of Tew’s career, including a profile written after he went on to co-found the meditation app Calm, treated the pixel site less as a business than as proof that an idea could generate its own publicity simply by being transparent about a number climbing toward a stated target — the same mechanism IWANNABERICH’s homepage leans on with its live wealth counter and public vote tally.
The two projects share a structural insight: a transparent, climbing public number is itself the product, independent of whatever is nominally being sold. Tew was selling advertising space; IWANNABERICH is selling participation in a story with an admittedly absurd ending. Neither required the underlying commercial logic to make sense for the number to climb, because the number climbing was the entertainment. The difference is that Tew’s project had an actual commercial floor — a pixel was a real, deliverable thing — while IWANNABERICH’s backers are explicitly told they are buying nothing at all beyond, as the about page puts it, being part of finding out “whether honesty, consistency, and collective internet curiosity can carry an absurd goal farther than common sense would recommend.”
A small, recognizable genre of internet money experiments
IWANNABERICH did not invent the category it belongs to, and the fact that it has close contemporaries matters for judging how durable the idea is. A Product Hunt listing from the same period describes BillionBack as “the first AI-run company racing to $1B backed by everyday people,” with no venture funding, no board and an anonymous founder — a dollar-denominated project built around contributor numbers, tier badges and an “Achievement Wall” rather than IWANNABERICH’s euro-denominated vote-and-try loop. Separate listings for projects such as GiveMeFive, built around a single fixed €5 donation and a live world map, and CountOne, a “mystery counter” that charges €1 for a permanent number, point to the same underlying appeal: a small, transparent, slightly absurd public number that people pay to be part of.
None of these projects has published evidence of reaching anything close to its stated ambition, and that pattern is itself informative. The genre survives not because any single entry succeeds at its stated goal, but because the premise — watch a number grow, in public, for a few euros — is cheap to build, costs a backer almost nothing to join, and generates its own story regardless of the outcome. IWANNABERICH’s €13 and BillionBack’s undisclosed early total are both, in that sense, already a kind of success: each has produced a public artifact and an audience, which was arguably always the actual product on offer.
What separates the entries in this genre from one another is mostly packaging rather than mechanics. BillionBack frames itself around an “AI-run company” and a tiered contributor system with badges and a wall of names; CountOne strips the concept down to a single payment and a hidden number; GiveMeFive fixes the contribution at exactly €5 and visualizes it on a world map rather than a counter. IWANNABERICH’s own variation is the vote, which none of its close contemporaries appear to use in the same way — a detail that matters because it is the one mechanic in the whole project that cannot simply be copied from the Million Dollar Homepage. A pixel grid needed no community input to fill itself in; a vote on what the operator tries next needs an audience willing to keep showing up between milestones, which is a harder thing to sustain than a one-time purchase.
Who carries the risk when strangers hold the vote
The distribution of risk in IWANNABERICH runs in an unusual direction. In a conventional business, the founder takes on the financial and reputational risk of a bad decision while investors share only the financial downside they agreed to. Here, the operator keeps essentially all of the practical risk — their own time, their own labor on whatever idea wins the vote, and the public record of their own failures — while contributors risk only the small, explicitly non-refundable amount they chose to give. A voter who picks the losing option in the current three-way choice between flipping an item, building a digital product or trying an “internet hustle” loses nothing beyond the few seconds it took to click; the operator is the one who has to carry out whichever option wins and report back on what it actually produced.
That asymmetry is probably what makes the voting mechanic palatable at this scale. Nobody voting is staking anything beyond curiosity, which is also why the vote cannot be mistaken for genuine governance of the kind a cooperative or a shareholder structure would offer. The site’s own share-prompt copy, which invites visitors to post that they are “watching someone try to become a billionaire in public,” treats the vote explicitly as a spectator activity rather than as a stake in an outcome, and the operator’s own framing never suggests otherwise.
The one party whose risk is harder to see is the operator’s own privacy. Choosing to stay anonymous protects them from the reputational exposure that a named individual would face if the project were ever mocked, ignored, or accused of being something other than what it claims — but it also means a visitor has no way to verify who is actually spending the money, beyond the public ledger the project chooses to publish. That trade-off, transparency of numbers in exchange for opacity of identity, is itself one of the more carefully balanced features of the whole design.
The actual purchase behind a small contribution
Stripped of its billion-euro headline, IWANNABERICH is asking for something narrower and more honest than most crowdfunding pitches: a small payment in exchange for a documented story and a vote on what happens next. The site’s donation flow, which opens a Stripe checkout for amounts between €0.50 and €10,000, states plainly that a contribution “buys no ownership or share of profits” and that support is “optional.” That is an unusually blunt disclosure for a site asking strangers for money, and it is also what keeps the project legally simple: without an equity offer, a profit share, or a promised return, IWANNABERICH sits outside the securities and crowdfunding regulation that would apply if it promised backers anything beyond a running public ledger and a vote.
The vote itself is the more interesting product on offer, because it hands a contributor something most businesses never share with outside parties: a say in tactical decisions, even trivial ones, made in public and tied to real money. A visitor who has never run a business gets to help decide whether €13 goes toward flipping an item, building a tiny digital product, or an unspecified “internet hustle,” and then gets to watch the real result, cost included, rather than a sanitized case study written after the fact.
The honest reading of why this will not reach €1 billion
No version of this experiment, examined on its own stated terms, plausibly reaches €1 billion through small voluntary contributions and whatever a single anonymous person can earn from a €13 starting stake. The arithmetic does not need a study to falsify it: assembling that sum from individual donations capped at €10,000, in a project with no confirmed following beyond a recent Product Hunt listing and a handful of translated pages, would require a scale of participation several orders of magnitude beyond what any comparable internet-money project — the Million Dollar Homepage included, at roughly one-thousandth the target — has ever achieved. The site’s own about page does not pretend otherwise, calling the amount “a ridiculous amount of money” chosen specifically because it is absurd, and the story page states directly that the operator is “not claiming” to know how to become a billionaire.
That admission is the most credible part of the entire project, and it is also what separates IWANNABERICH most clearly from the financial schemes that sometimes borrow similar language and similar numbers to very different ends. A site promising wealth while refusing to promise any return, and documenting its own failures as part of the stated plan, is not describing an investment at all; it is describing a publicly performed hobby with a crowd-voted plot. Judged as a hobby, the only honest failure condition is the operator losing interest, not the billion-euro number staying forever out of reach — which is exactly what the site’s own milestones page, ending not at €1 billion but at the far more immediate €100, seems to be quietly conceding.
The vote-and-try loop is testing something smaller
The more durable question IWANNABERICH raises has nothing to do with the size of its target. It is whether outsourcing small, tactical business decisions to an anonymous crowd produces choices meaningfully different from what a single founder would pick alone, and whether a contributor base will stay engaged once the novelty of voting on someone else’s €13 wears off. Those are small, testable claims, unlike the billion-euro framing that surrounds them, and the site’s own transparent updates log and public code repository mean the answers, whatever they turn out to be, will be unusually easy for an outside observer to check later.
If the project keeps publishing its failures as faithfully as its milestones, the useful outcome will not be a number anywhere near ten figures. It will be a small, oddly rigorous public record of what happens when ordinary internet strangers are handed real, if tiny, control over somebody else’s money, with nothing promised back to them except the chance to watch what they chose play out.
Whether that record continues at all depends on something the site cannot engineer: whether the operator keeps finding it worth their own time once the novelty of a Product Hunt launch has faded and the vote count settles into whatever becomes its normal size. A pixel grid like Tew’s could be left alone once it sold out, generating its value passively for years afterward. A vote-and-try loop has no equivalent resting state — it needs a new decision, a new attempt and a new result on some rough schedule, or the “public record” the project promises simply stops updating. That ongoing labor cost, not the size of the billion-euro target, is the more realistic constraint on how long IWANNABERICH lasts.
Reader questions about IWANNABERICH and how the experiment works
IWANNABERICH is a public website run by an anonymous operator with the stated long-term goal of reaching €1 billion, starting from €0. Visitors can vote on what the operator tries next with the money raised, and every cost, result and failure is published as part of the experiment.
The site’s own homepage states that €13 has been raised toward its first milestone of €100, with the long-term €1,000,000,000 goal described explicitly as an “absurd long-term goal” rather than a forecast.
The operator has chosen to remain anonymous. The site’s about page states that the identity behind the project will only be revealed if the experiment reaches €1,000,000,000, which it calls “a wildly optimistic milestone reward.”
According to the site’s own experiment page, the process follows a Suggest, Vote, Try, Result loop: visitors suggest ideas, the community votes on which one to attempt, the operator carries out the winning idea, and the real outcome, including any cost or loss, is published.
No. The site’s donation flow and experiment page both state explicitly that support “buys no ownership or share of profits” and that “no financial return is promised.” Contributions are described as voluntary and non-refundable.
The site’s own story page says the idea began as a conversation between the operator and their brother-in-law about building a website where people could contribute small amounts of money that would simply be allowed to accumulate in public, documented the whole way.
Structurally it resembles The Million Dollar Homepage, a 2005 project by British student Alex Tew that raised just over $1 million by selling advertising pixels at $1 each. Both projects turn a publicly visible, climbing number into the main attraction. More recent, closer contemporaries on Product Hunt include BillionBack, GiveMeFive and CountOne, each built around a similarly small, transparent public figure.
Yes. The site’s front-end code is maintained in a public repository, which includes the configuration confirming it builds the live iwannaberich.xyz domain, along with commits adding features such as a community idea-submission board routed through a linked discussion forum.
As of the site’s most recent public update, the project had listed itself on Product Hunt and added multiple language translations, with its “current experiment” page asking visitors to vote between using the initial €13 to resell an item, build a small digital product, or attempt an unspecified “internet hustle.”
Nothing in the publicly available evidence suggests it will. The scale required from small voluntary contributions and a single person’s earnings from a €13 starting stake would need to vastly exceed any comparable internet money-experiment to date, and the site’s own about and story pages describe the goal as deliberately absurd rather than as a realistic plan.
Author:
Jan Bielik
CEO & Founder of Webiano Digital & Marketing Agency
This article is an original analysis supported by the sources cited below
IWANNABERICH — The goal: €1 billion
The source code of IWANNABERICH’s live homepage, confirming its current €13 total, its €100 first milestone, its Suggest-Vote-Try-Result loop, and its Stripe donation terms of €0.50 to €10,000 with no ownership or return offered.
About — IWANNABERICH
The source of the site’s About page, describing the operator’s anonymity, the condition for revealing their identity at €1,000,000,000, and the stated purpose of the experiment.
Why this exists — IWANNABERICH
The source of the site’s Story page, describing the project’s origin in a conversation with the operator’s brother-in-law and the explicit disclaimer that no outcome is promised.
The €1 billion experiment — IWANNABERICH
The source of the site’s experiment page, laying out the Suggest, Vote, Try, Result mechanic and the ground rules describing €1 billion as a goal rather than a forecast.
Milestones — IWANNABERICH
The source of the site’s milestones page, listing the sequence of small markers from €5 to €100 that precede any progress toward the stated billion-euro target.
iwannaberich-v4/CNAME at main
The repository’s domain configuration file, confirming that this codebase builds the live iwannaberich.xyz website.
Add a community idea board for the €1 billion goal by aaaddd112 · Pull Request #21
A merged pull request on the project’s public repository showing the operator adding a community idea-submission feature, including use of an AI coding assistant for incremental development.
The Million Dollar Homepage
Wikipedia’s documented account of Alex Tew’s 2005 pixel-advertising project, including its launch date, total raised, and the final eBay auction of its last pixels.
What Ever Happened to The Million Dollar Homepage?
A retrospective on Alex Tew’s project and its creator’s later career, used here to confirm the project’s standing as the clearest historical precedent for a public, climbing internet money total.
BillionBack – First AI-run company racing to $1B backed by everyday people
A Product Hunt listing for a contemporary, dollar-denominated project built on a similar anonymous-founder, crowd-backed premise, used here as a comparison point for the genre IWANNABERICH belongs to.
GiveMeFive
A listing for a comparable internet money experiment built around a single fixed €5 donation and a live public map, cited here as further evidence of the genre’s small but recognizable pattern.
CountOne – A mystery counter. Pay €1, get your number forever.
A listing for another small-scale, transparent public-counter project in the same genre as IWANNABERICH, cited for comparison.
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This article was prepared with the assistance of artificial intelligence tools. The content underwent expert human review, and Webiano Digital & Marketing Agency assumes editorial responsibility for its final version and publication.
