6 Most Lucrative Businesses Made Billion Dollars With A Bunch Of Stupid Ideas
Many people want to build a startup influenced by other successful companies in the world. Well, it all takes grit, time, and peddle patience. Many of you have heard the startups like Instagram, and Facebook, and "just want to say that I want to build a company like that. All I need, have one "stupid" idea.
After all the conventional wisdom is that with a smart idea making billions is just a matter of details. Here is a bunch of 'stupid' ideas that made billions.
#One Snapchat
When Evan Spiegel stood up in a Stanford product design class to present an idea for his final project who was junior at that time, he explained a mobile app where friends could share relishing and random photos usually, only available for a short time before they become inaccessible to their recipients.
Everyone said, 'That is a terrible idea," Spiegel remembers. "Not only is nobody going to use it, they said,
Everyone said, ‘That is a terrible idea.’
#Two Apple
On April Fool’s Day of 1976, Jobs and Wozniak founded Apple Computer Inc. Wozniak designed what was going to be Apple 1.
He named his brand "Apple" because he like an Apple and the reason for the bite was to clarify clearly that the fruit is an Apple. It delivers a clear, concise and more approachable way.
Because he was a proud HP employee and loved the company, he believed the product rightfully belongs to his employer as he signed a document stating everything he designs for HP. So he approached his managers with a proposal to manufacture it... 5 times.
“I begged Hewlett-Packard to make the Apple I. Five times they turned me down.”
#Three Airbnb
Renting Airbnb in your living room to random people and serving them breakfast sounds like the kind of idea you should be secretive about or everyone will instantly recognize the potential, deploy it and watch it turn into billion dollar business right?
It turns out AirBnb founders told it everybody thought it was a dumb idea.
Friends of founders, all investors, including those who invested in and even founders themselves.
According to Brian Chesky, “We thought this idea wasn’t going to work the moment we came up with it”. The only investor who gave AirBnB a chance was Paul Graham who said:
It turns our
“We thought Airbnb was a bad idea. We funded it because we really liked the founders.”
#Four Space X
Elon Musk got tweets, ' Creating a rocket company has to be the dumbest and most challenging way to make money. His two best-known companies, especially considering that Tesa has a market cap of over $52 billion, while Forbes values the private rocket company SpaceX at more than $20 billion.
Despite the risk, Musk said that he wanted to find the solution, things that don't seem to be working are important for our future and for the world to be good. His ability to change the world was beyond imagination and that made him world's wealthiest man in the world.
An internet entrepreneur started a company that builds rockets on the premise of; if NASA can launch a rocket for $100 million, we can do it for $50 million.
According to Elon Musk himself:
“In fact, when I started SpaceX, I thought that the most likely outcome was failure. And I think to have any other expectation would have been irrational.”
#Five Google
When Google started there were some 20 search engines everyone was already using. Google was so late to the market they were practically irrelevant. And that wasn't all. Most of the existing search engines were so commercially unsuccessful that everyone categorized them as money losers. As for Google, the only difference was that they stripped down all the content from their homepage.
At that particular time the idea was so bad that when Larry Page offered to sell Google to Excite for $750,000, Excite didn’t even want it.
#Six Facebook
In one of his essays, Paul Graham recalls "One of my most valuable memories is how lame Facebook sounded to me when I first heard about it. A site for college students to waste time?
When Facebook started there were already Friendster and Myspace. Before them, there were several social networking sites most of which failed.
Social networking was a trend, there were sites like Facebook popping out everywhere around the world. it was probably the least original idea of all at the time and their focus was Harvard alone.
The best ideas look initially like bad ideas.”
The magic of just doing something.
Many of our potential clients at Appster have been waiting for ages for “that great idea.”
If you think of startups like Paypal — they had five ideas that failed but they executed every one of them.
Instagram started as Burnbn — a foursquare knockoff. Pinterest began as an e-commerce startup and Youtube as a dating site. AirBnB sold cereals. Steve Jobs and Woz hacked phones for money before officially founding Apple.
In summary,
If you have a dream to build a business but seek a great idea to start?
You will never be able to start over.
A bad idea leads to better results. It is all about the execution.
Google seemed like a failure but it took them a few years to build AdSense that made them successful and it wasn’t even their idea.
Mark Zuckerberg did some great execution in gradually infiltrating the market and maintaining growth higher than all other social networks. He also managed his board well and got the best people to work with him.
AirBnB relaunched three times until getting it right and Paypal failed four times but they hung in there.
The history and all the most successful startups above prove to us once again that all we need isn’t just a good idea.
Instead, we need to show up and keep executing. We need to keep just doing something no matter how challenging it gets at times.
As Chuck Close puts it perfectly:
“Inspiration is for amateurs — the rest of us just show up and get to work.”
