Bright idea: Charge for a pixel
The year was 2005, and the young Alex Tew, 21, needed money to finish his studies. So he came up with the brilliant and simple idea of creating a website called The Million Dollar Homepage. It was a blank sheet with a resolution of 1000 x 1000 pixels, that is, a million pixels. He put each pixel up for sale at a price of one dollar, in blocks of 10x10 pixels, and the buyer could post images, links and text there. The original idea became viral, and in just four months Alex Tew sold his million pixels, raising a total of 1,037,100 dollars (the last thousand were auctioned, and they paid more money for them).
Bright Idea: Eliminate the Middlemen
While still a college student in the early 1980s, Michael Dell realized that computers at the time were so expensive due to commissions from brokers and stores. He had the idea of creating a company in which they would assemble the PCs and sell them directly to the public, customizing them for each client, without going through the stores. Michael Dell dropped out of school to make his simple technology idea a reality, and in 1983 he created the Dell company. Two years later he put his first Turbo PC up for direct sale, and in just 12 months he sold $70 million worth of computers. By 2001, Dell was already the world's largest PC vendor. After going public and selling shares, Michael Dell returned to recover the company from him paying almost 25,000 million dollars in 2013.
Brilliant Idea: Who doesn't laugh at a fart?
Currently the App Store has more than two million apps. Everything is made up. But in the early years of Apple's digital store, a flatulence app was something of a novelty. At Christmas 2008, the iFart app became the best-selling app on the App Store. What was it for? You pressed a button, and a fart sounded. You could choose between different types of sounds with funny names. And that's it. The ideas associated with eschatology never fail...
Its author, Joel Comm, earned $10,000 a day for several months, until the endless clones flooded the store and people got tired of the nonsense.
Bright idea: Self-destructing messages
In 2010 there were already dozens of messaging applications, which allowed you to send and receive text messages and photos instantly, through your mobile. Three Stanford undergraduates, Evan Spiegel, Bobby Murphy, and Reggie Brown, came up with a simple idea: create a messaging app...where messages would be deleted within seconds of being read. They called their app Picaboo, but the name was already taken, so they changed it to Snapchat.
This increase in privacy and the stealth nature of the application captivated the youngest, to the point of direct competition with Facebook. Snapchat currently has a market value of almost 20,000 million dollars. Evan Spiegel's fortune exceeds 3,000 million dollars.
Bright idea: The good, if brief, twice as good
Like Snapchat, Twitter knew how to give classic messaging a twist, with a simple idea worth millions. Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams, Biz Stone, and Noah Glass thought that too much time was wasted with long messages on social networks, so they devised a system that only allowed 140 characters to be used (although years later it was expanded). The rest, as they say, is history (and many millions in the bank).
Bright idea: infidelity as a business
Millions of people are unfaithful to their partners. Or they secretly seek infidelity. Why not charge them for it? Ashley Madison is a social network for couples who are already in a relationship. Their motto, "life is short, have an adventure," says it all. Ashley Madison once had millions of users, but in 2015 it was hacked and all of her customer data was made public. Marriages were broken, there was talk of suicide... Even so, the social network is still active.
Bright idea: refill ink cartridges
They were not the pioneers, but they knew how to get a slice of their idea. Father Bernard McCoy went one day to buy ink for his printer, but it seemed too expensive. So with the help of eight other monks from Monroe Abbey, he came up with the idea of refilling cartridges with ink they created themselves, and selling them. In 2002 they invoiced 2000 dollars. In 2005, 2.5 million dollars.
Human evolution is the result of technology, and advances in science and medicine. But in practice, it is based on little everyday ideas that allow us to reduce the time it takes to complete a task. Our ancestors spent hours washing clothes and dishes in the river, going to the garden to gather the day's food, or skinning a chicken to cook it. Tasks that we now complete in minutes, and thus we have time for many other things.
Doing more things throughout the day they call it evolution, but maybe we should rethink the subject...
In any case, these simple ideas have revolutionized our day-to-day life, putting an end to some problems that were bothering us, or allowing us to complete common tasks in less time.
Brilliant idea: Take advantage of a glue that does not stick
The genius of some human beings allows them to turn a failure into a simple idea worth millions. The popular Post-it started with a failure: Spencer Silver, a scientist at the 3M company, invented a glue... that did not stick well. 15 years later, his colleague Arthur Fry used it to keep the bookmark for his religious song book from falling to the ground. Surprised, he discovered that the adhesive held the paper very well, peeling it off required no effort, and left no mark. This is how he came up with the idea for the Post-it, which 3M marketed in 1980. Billions of units have been sold worldwide.
Bright idea: An ecological ring
If you are over 40 years old, you will surely remember when the rings of the cans were completely removed. Most of the time it ended up on the ground. Thousands upon thousands of polluting aluminum rings. In 1974 Dan Cudzik, an engineer at canmaker Reynolds, and his team spent 37,000 hours perfecting a system called Stay-on-Tab (SOT) and adapting the factory for mass creation. With the SOT system the ring does not come off the can. Cudzik only received a silver dollar for his work, while Reynolds earned $20 million. When the patent expired, this non-polluting ring became universal.
Bright idea: I refuse to wash diapers
Can you believe that until 1951, baby diapers were washed? Doing it by hand was a nightmare and if they messed with the laundry, they completely ruined it. Inventor Marion Donovan invented disposable diapers in 1941, wrapping them in a shower curtain so they could be thrown away. She perfected the system and tried to market it for 10 years, without success, so she opened her own store to sell them. A diaper company bought her patent for a million dollars. Millions of parents thank you every day.
Brilliant Idea: Trading in Children's Illusion
The Santamail company came up with this simple idea worth millions: register a postal address in the North Pole (Alaska) and charge parents $10 to send their children a personalized letter from Santa Claus, with a genuine North Pole seal. . In 10 years he has sent more than 500,000 letters. At 10 bucks each, do the numbers...
Dog glasses? Stones sold as pets? Pure bottled air? On paper they are absurd ideas, but their inventors became millionaires.
Never underestimate the power of nonsense, and even less so in the golden age of virals and trending topics... If your simple and stupid idea is popular on social media, open a bank account...
Bright Idea: Sell Air
If you type in the Google search engine Buy a star, dozens of services that sell stars will appear. Which shows two things: that the business has no reliability, and that there are many people who buy them...
We're not exactly sure who came up with the idea, but it's great. Convince someone to buy something that does not belong to anyone, nor can be possessed. But hey, pay me money and I'll sell it to you. And the thing worked. Despite the fact that it is clearly stated in the contract that the appointment is purely symbolic and another star registration company could have given it another name, people are still paying 80 euros for... a piece of paper? Pure awesomeness.
Brilliant idea: Engineering at the service of imagination
We've all had a Slinky when we were kids. Although here we knew it as the crazy dock, and other variants. Technically it is a pre-compressed coil spring, capable of stretching ten times its size without any effort and recovering its original shape in tenths of a second. The children's favorite trick is to get him to go down the stairs, but many others can be done.
It was invented by the naval engineer Richard James, in 1943. Although he never wanted to sell them for more than a dollar so that even poor children could play with him, he became a millionaire because he sold more than 300 million over 60 years, even despite of plagiarism.
Bright idea: sell stones
Gary Dahl was sick of hearing his friends complain about his pets. So he came up with a simple idea that made him a millionaire: he decided to sell stones as pets. You don't have to feed them, you don't have to take them out for a walk, they don't spend money, they don't bother you, and they keep you company. The Pet Rock went on sale in 1975, and Dahl managed to earn $15 million at the time.
Bright idea: reinvent a classic
Children have played with rubber bands all their lives, mainly with the ones they find at home, but it cannot be considered a toy. Until the Silly Banz arrived, which are... colored erasers in the shape of animals, objects, or letters. They don't add any extra functionality, but kids collected them, and they sold hundreds of millions. Its main virtue: that they always recovered their original shape, after wearing it on the wrist. They were invented by the Japanese Yumiko Ohashi and Masonar Haneda in 2002.
