This started with a tweet

On August 19, 2026, at 11:08pm, Jonathan Wilke posted a screenshot and a link. Thirteen minutes earlier he had been checking a Polar webhook. Then the site was live.

Aaaaaaand we’re live!

outbid.lol

No ads. No API keys. No revenue sharing.

Just outbid your competitors to rank #1 and consider marketing done for today 🚀

— @jonathan_wilke, Aug 19, 2026

That tweet is why instabid.lol exists. Not as a joke we invented in a vacuum. As a reaction to watching a very specific thing happen in public, in real time, and realizing the same mechanic would be funnier on Instagram than it already was on a list of SaaS landing pages.

This is the origin post. Credit first, then the inspection, then why we didn’t copy the checkout.

The tweet, not the myth

Jonathan is 29, from Germany, blue-verified, and already known in indie circles as the person behind supastarter and supatools. His bio on X is short: age, flag, laptop, rocket. Three links. That’s it. He quit a job in 2025 after the starter kit hit about $10k a month. He is not a mysterious growth-hacker. He is a person who ships and then tweets the shipping.

The launch post is here. As of the day we wrote this, it had crossed 1.6 million views, 800-plus likes, hundreds of quotes. The quoted post underneath it is even smaller and, in some ways, more honest:

Almost there… Just checking the Polar web hook setup 💸

— @jonathan_wilke, 20:55 GMT, Aug 19

Polar is the merchant of record. The webhook is how a paid bid becomes a row on the board. He was still wiring money thirteen minutes before the “we’re live” screenshot. That is the actual texture of the launch: not a campaign, a late evening, a payment provider, a public ranking.

The replies started immediately. Jesse Hanley, founder of Bento, called it a “Scammy campaign.” Michał Ordon wrote that he did the same thing during the Million Dollar Homepage craze twenty years ago and got it to a whole $2. Charlie J posted a screenshot of his own listing and said he’d be outbid soon. The argument was already the product: is this advertising, a joke, a scam, or all three.

We read that thread the way you read a product spec. Not because we wanted to clone Polar. Because the mechanic was sitting there in one sentence: rank is the bid. Everything else on Instagram — follower counts, blue ticks, “creator” labels — pretends to be a ranking and is not.

What happened in the next 36 hours

Jonathan posted a recap the next evening. The numbers are his, from this tweet:

• launched outbid.lol at 11:08pm
• 200k+ visitors
• $21,499 in revenue
• 1,500+ new followers
• analytics provider broke
• someone offered $100k to buy the site
• three copycats already live

Twelve hours later, another recap. Thirty-six hours after launch: $42k revenue, a $10k high bid from Lewis Carhart, a million-plus visitors, at least ten copycats, analytics swapped to DataFast.

By the time we pulled outbid.lol/about for this post, the about page itself was showing north of a million visitors and more than $125,000 in revenue, with joni.ai sitting on a $14,013 high bid. Those counters move. Treat them as a snapshot, not a forever number. The point is the shape of the curve, not the last digit.

Lewis, who had been sitting on the throne, later posted that Comp AI’s sales team was seeing a 30% win rate on demos, a 14-day close, and LTV from one win that would cover the ad many times over. Jonathan quoted it: “This is a pretty good ROI for Comp AI from outbid.lol.” That is the other half of the story. For some companies this was not a meme. It was a live auction for a firehose of indie-hacker attention, and the firehose paid back.

We are not claiming instabid will do that. We are saying we watched it happen, took notes, and then built a different board.

What we actually inspected

If you only read the launch tweet, outbid looks like a toy. If you click through, it is a payment product with a toy interface.

You paste a URL or a handle. You pick a dollar amount. New spots start around $5. Paying less than the current #1 price still puts you on the board at whatever rank that bid can buy. Already on the list? Same URL, higher bid. Rank is total spend, not votes, not stars, not “engagement.” Click counters sit next to the price so everyone can see whether the people at the top are also getting traffic.

The homepage, when we scraped it, had joni.ai at $14,013, outrank.so at $13,005, orynth.dev at $12,716, crowdreply.io at $12,711, trycomp.ai at $10,000. Those are not $5 joke bids. Those are companies treating a public leaderboard like a Times Square billboard that happens to refresh every time someone is annoyed.

That is the inspection. The product is three things stacked:

1. A ranking that anyone can read in one second.
2. A payment that changes the ranking.
3. A screenshot that becomes the next wave of traffic.

Item 3 is the loop. Every outbid is content. Content is visitors. Visitors make the next bid more valuable. Jim Clyde Monge wrote a whole piece about this on Generative AI: people pay for rank because there is traffic, and there is traffic because people are talking about how much others will pay. Copy the code without the audience and you have a list. Copy the audience without the mechanic and you have a screenshot with no punchline.

We did not want to steal the firehose. We wanted the punchline on a different dataset.

Why Instagram, not another .lol for startups

Instagram already has a leaderboard. It just refuses to admit it.

Open the app. Every profile shows a follower count as if that number is the rank. Brands print it on pitch decks. Creators screenshot it. Agencies sell against it. Nike sits around 291 million followers. Cristiano Ronaldo is north of 678 million. Instagram’s own account is even higher. None of that tells you who would actually fight for the top of a public board today, this afternoon, with a number you can change.

Follower counts do not move in a way you can watch. They accrue. They get bought. They get frozen on private accounts. They lie about reach. A 400-follower account with a loud owner will spend more energy defending a rank than a 291-million-follower brand that does not know the board exists. That mismatch is the joke. It is also the product.

outbid.lol ranks websites and products. The unit is a URL. The prize is referral clicks from a page full of founders. instabid.lol ranks Instagram accounts. The unit is a public handle. The prize is being seen, in order, next to people you would never outrank by followers.

Same sentence — outbid whoever is above you — different object.

That is the whole difference we care about. We did not rebuild Polar. We did not take a cut of a $14,000 bid. We took the ranking idea, pointed it at Instagram, and kept the board as a scoreboard.

What we refused to copy

Jonathan asked, in public, why some clones had no credit for outbid.lol in the footer. Fair. The mechanic is his. The 11:08pm launch is his. The Polar webhook, the $100k offer screenshot, the analytics meltdown — that is his week. instabid is a side project that started by reading that week.

Here is what we did not copy:

Real checkout. On instabid, bids are not a card charge. Opening bid is $5 on the board. Re-adding the same handle bumps the number by $5. That is a score, not a Stripe event. If you came here expecting to buy the #1 Instagram slot with a wire transfer, you are on the wrong site. Go to outbid.lol. They actually take the money.

URL-shaped rows. We do not list landing pages. We list Instagram usernames. We pull the public profile — display name, avatar, follower count, verified badge, bio, post count — once, store it, and show it. Avatars get re-hosted so Instagram’s image links can rot without punching holes in the board.

The “marketing done for today” promise. Jonathan’s line works because the people bidding on outbid are selling software to the same crowd that is looking at the board. Instagram is not that crowd. A handle at #1 on instabid is a flex, a bit, a dare. It is not a guaranteed demo pipeline. We will not pretend it is.

Silence about the original. The about page names Jonathan. The footer names outbid.lol. This post links the launch tweet. If you only remember one URL from this article, make it that tweet.

The inspection, as a checklist

We went through the public record the way you go through a repo.

His X profile: 29, Germany, ~18k followers at the time we looked, three t.co links that resolve to supastarter, outbid, and supatools.

The 11:08pm live tweet and the webhook tweet 13 minutes earlier.

The 24-hour recap: 200k visitors, $21,499, $100k offer, three copycats.

The 36-hour recap: $42k, $10k top bid, 1,061,848 visitors, ten copycats.

The about page, later: 1.08 million visitors on the live counter when we first hit it, then a higher number on a second pass, $125k revenue, $14,013 high bid.

The replies: scam accusation, Million Dollar Homepage memory, people posting their own rows.

The clones he praised in public: topapp.lol for mobile apps, whosetheboss.lol which made him realize he was missing dark mode.

The clones he did not praise: a pile of near-identical .lol domains that Jim Clyde Monge listed out — claimrank, watchbid, takeone, lastspot, overbid, outrank.lol, spots.lol, bidwall, rankly.vip.

The ROI thread from Comp AI, quoted by Jonathan.

That is enough. You do not need a rumored “three-hour build” to understand the product. You need the tweet, the board, and the fact that people paid.

Why ship a board that does not charge

Because Instagram already charges people in a worse currency: time, posting cadence, giveaways, bought followers, the vague hope that the algorithm is in a good mood.

A public bid is uglier and cleaner. You can see it. You can beat it. You cannot hide behind “the algorithm didn’t push it.” If you are #47, it is because 46 handles have a higher number on this page. That is the entire explanation.

We also did not want to stand up a payments stack for a joke that is funnier when it is free to play. Polar made sense for outbid because the buyers were companies with cards on file, hunting clicks from a million-visitor page. Our board is for handles. The people who will care first are creators, small brands, friends daring each other. Taking $14,000 from that group to sit above Nike would be a different product, and not the one we wanted to ship this week.

So: no ads. No API keys you have to paste. No revenue share. That line is Jonathan’s. We kept the spirit and dropped the invoice.

What “inspired by” is supposed to mean

Inspired by does not mean pixel-identical. It does not mean swapping the logo and hoping nobody notices the footer. It means we looked at a live system, named the person who built it, and then asked a narrower question.

Question: if rank is the bid, what happens when the rows are Instagram profiles instead of startup URLs?

Answer: you get a leaderboard for egos. Nike can still be on it. A 400-follower account can sit above Nike if they keep bumping the number. The follower count is still visible, which makes the inversion louder. That is instabid.

If you want the original, it is still up. It is still taking real bids. Jonathan is still posting updates. He is still 29, still in Germany, still linking the same three sites. We are a fork of the idea, not a fork of the repo.

Go add a handle on the board. Or go read the launch tweet first. Either order is fine. The tweet is the start of this site whether you click it or not.