How I sold 1.6 million pixels of my future iPhone X‘s lock screen 📱💵

5 min readDec 20, 2017

It all started with a tweet from Fabian, pointing out that if every of his 4,680 followers would pay him 0.247€ he could buy himself an iPhone X.

Long story short, he didn’t make it. He got 60.37€, doubled that amount and donated the money to a local charity organisation 👏

Suddenly I also felt the strong need to own an iPhone X. Within a few minutes my idea of asking for money to buy an iPhone X was born.

🚨🙈 Spoiler alert: I didn’t reach my goal of selling at least 70% of all pixels so I also donated all earnings. ➡️ Download the nearly finished wallpaper.

I am going to sell pixels of my future iPhone X’s lock screen 📱

Let’s do the math 👩‍🏫

iPhone X resolution is 2,436 x 1,125 = 2,740,500 pixels to sell. iPhone X 256 GB + AppleCare would cost me around 1,500 EUR (= 1,778 USD). 1,778 / 2,740,500 = $0.00064 per pixel. To cover all extra costs (domain, hosting and payment provider), let’s round it up to $0.0007 per pixel.

Building the site 👨‍💻

Of course everything should be done online with instant feedback and live updates of what’s happening.

It should all be done in 4 simple steps:

Upload your image
Find a free spot and place your image
Pay via Stripe secure payment
Celebrate your purchase 🎉

There was just one tiny little problem: I wanted to launch on Black Friday (November 24). It was November 20 already so I had only 4 days to build and test everything.

Day 1 — The design 👩‍🎨

I am definitely not a designer. But at the time I started my career as a web developer back in 2004, you had to do everything from concept and design to development and hosting. So I know at least how to open Sketch place text and move some pixels around.

Day 2 — Coding ⌨️

My weapons of choice to build this site were clear straight from the beginning: Webpack, React and of course styled-components 💅.

I always try to tackle the hardest part of every project first. In this case it was obviously the image positioning & placement process. I already had some needs in mind:

Use a grid system to avoid dead spaces like 2px wide and 20px high
Sell at least a certain amount of pixels (1 grid unit)
Build functionality for proper image scaling and positioning
Update the price while moving the image around
Let people link their image to their website

💡 Most people didn’t even use the positioning modes to perfectly fit their image onto the grid 🤷‍

This is how the first implementation looked like

Day 3 — Deployment 🚧 & Testing 🕵️‍

90% of my side projects are hosted on my own DigitalOcean instance. This time I was eager to test something new — Google Firebase 🔥

With Firebase you get a real-time database, a file storage and hosting out of the box + a javascript framework that works hand in hand with React.

I needed the server side part to process the payment (which was handled by Stripe), host all images and generate the composed background image in real-time.

Day4 — Launch🕺

The day has come. I barely slept the night before. I did some final tests and prepared everything for the launch:

Check sharing preview 🔗
Google Analytics 📈
Remove all console.log’s 😊
Check that the site doesn’t break on mobile devices 📱
Change all API Test-Keys to Production-Keys 🔑
Remove all test entries 🗑

Usually I post every side project on Product Hunt. The community is amazing and it gives your project good momentum. But this project wasn’t really a product which solves a common problem or need (except mine 😂). So no Product Hunt this time 😕

So I was on my own to get this thing off 🤷‍ Back to the roots: Just tweet about it. The only growhack I did was tagging some people I knew they would like what I did (Yes, I did mention Product Hunt anyway because you never know).

Boom. I was exhausted. 4 days of hard work.

👉 https://blackfridaypixel.sale

I knew it takes some time to get traction so I left my workplace and rested for a moment. When I came back the first pixels where sold and I was quite confident this thing could work.

Over the next 24 hours I sold around 1M pixels which brought me $800 closer to my new iPhone X.

The day after 💰

Against my expectations I woke up and somehow the momentum went down. I had close to none visitors on my site. It definitely broke out of my bubble but it didn’t gain enough attention.

I tried to push it again with some additional tweets. But without people to mention I had not enough reach.

Later that day I got some local press coverage. That brought me some additional buyers.

The purchase of my iPhone X (did not happen) 🚫📱

After being online for one month, I sold only 61% of all pixels. Thats 1.631.250 pixels * $0,0007 per pixel. That makes $1.141,87 (- $91,35 rejected payments).

So I earned $1050,52 from selling pixels of my future iPhone X’s lock screen which I all donated to charity: water.