List
Bright idea: Charge per pixel
The year was 2005, and 21-year-old Alex Tew 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, one million pixels. He put each pixel up for sale at the price of one dollar, in blocks of 10x10 pixels, and the buyer could post images, links and text there. The original idea went viral, and in just four months Alex Tew sold his million pixels, raising a total of $1,037,100 (the last thousand were auctioned, and they paid more money for them).
Dell
Bright Idea: Cut Out the Middle Man
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 came up with 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 technological idea a reality, and in 1983 he created the company Dell. Two years later he put his first Turbo PC up for direct sale, and in just 12 months he sold computers worth 70 million dollars. In 2001 Dell was already the world's largest PC seller. After going public and selling shares, Michael Dell returned to recover his company by paying almost 25,000 million dollars in 2013.
iFart
Bright idea: Who doesn't laugh with a fart?
Currently the App Store has more than two million apps. Everything is invented. But in the early years of Apple's digital store, a flatulence app was something of a novelty. In Christmas 2008 the iFart app became the best seller in 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, made as much as $10,000 a day for several months, until endless clones flooded the store and people got tired of the nonsense.
Snapchat
Bright Idea: Messages That Self-Destruct
In 2010, there were already dozens of messaging applications that allowed you to send and receive text messages and photos instantly through your mobile phone. Three Stanford college students, 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 stealthiness of the application captivated the youngest, to the point of competing directly with Facebook. Currently Snapchat has a stock market value of almost 20,000 million dollars. Evan Spiegel's fortune exceeds 3,000 million dollars.
Bright idea: The good thing, if brief, is twice as good
Like Snapchat, Twitter knew how to give a twist to the classic messaging, with a simple idea that is worth millions. Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams, Biz Stone, and Noah Glass thought too much time was wasted on long social media messages, so they devised a system that only allowed 140 characters (although years later it was expanded). The rest, as they say, is history (and many millions in the bank).
Ashley Madison
Bright idea: cheating 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 she was hacked and all her client data became public. Marriages were broken, there was talk of suicides... Even so, the social network is still active.
Laser Monks
Brilliant idea: refill ink cartridges
They weren't the pioneers, but they knew how to get a piece 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 Monroe Abbey monks, he came up with the idea of refilling the cartridges with ink they created themselves, and selling them. In 2002 they invoiced 2000 dollars. In 2005, 2.5 million dollars.
Everyday ideas
Human evolution is the result of technology and advances in science and medicine. But in practice, it is based on small 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 food for the day, or skinning a chicken to cook it. Tasks that we now complete in minutes, and thus we have time for many other things.
Getting more done throughout the day is called evolution, but maybe we should rethink the subject...
In any case, these simple ideas have revolutionized our day to day, ending some problems that brought us headlong, or allowing us to complete common tasks in less time.
The Post-it
Brilliant idea: Take advantage of a glue that doesn't stick
The genius of some human beings allows them to turn a failure into a simple idea worth millions. The popular Post-it began with a failure: Spencer Silver, a scientist at the 3M company, invented a glue... that didn't stick well. 15 years later, his colleague Arthur Fry used it to prevent the bookmark from his book of religious songs from falling to the floor. Surprised, he discovered that the adhesive held the paper very well, removing it required no effort, and it did not leave a 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.
Stay-on-Tab
Bright idea: An eco-friendly 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 I ended up on the ground. Thousands of thousands of polluting aluminum rings. In 1974 Dan Cudzik, an engineer for 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 detach from the can. Cudzik only received a silver dollar for his work, while Reynolds earned $20 million. When the patent expired, this clean ring became universal.
Disposable diapers
Bright idea: I refuse to wash diapers
Can you believe that until 1951, babies' diapers were washed? Doing it by hand was a nightmare and if they messed with the laundry, they would completely ruin it. Inventor Marion Donovan devised disposable diapers in 1941, wrapping them with a shower curtain so they could be thrown away. He perfected the system and tried to market it for 10 years, without success, so he opened his own store to sell them. A diaper company bought the patent from him for a million dollars. Millions of parents say thank you every day.
Letter from Santa Claus
Bright Idea: Trading Children's Illusions
The Santamail company came up with this simple idea that is worth millions: register a mailing address at the North Pole, Alaska, and charge parents $10 to send their children a personalized letter from Santa Claus, with a genuine seal from the North Pole. In 10 years he has sent more than 500,000 letters. At $10 each, do the numbers...
The most curious simple ideas
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 foolishness, and even less in the golden age of virals and trending topics... If your simple and stupid idea falls in favor on social networks, open an account at the bank. ..
Selling stars
Brilliant idea: Selling 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 sure who came up with the idea, but it's great. Convince someone to buy something that does not belong to anyone, nor can it be owned. But hey, pay me money and I'll sell it to you. And the thing worked. Despite the fact that the contract clearly indicates that the appointment is purely symbolic and another star registration company could have given it another name, people continue to pay 80 euros for... a piece of paper? Pure genius.
Slinky
Bright Idea: Engineering at the Service of the 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. Children's favorite trick is to get him down the stairs, but many others can be done.
It was invented by marine 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 the plagiarisms.
The Pet Rock
Brilliant idea: sell rocks
Gary Dahl was sick of hearing his friends complain about their pets. So a simple idea came to mind 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 for a walk, they don't spend, they don't bother, and they keep company. The Pet Rock was put up for sale in 1975, and Dahl managed to earn $15 million at the time.
Silly Banz
Brilliant idea: reinventing a classic
Children have played with rubber bands all their lives, mainly with the ones they find around the house, but it cannot be considered a toy. Until Silly Banz arrived, which are... colored erasers shaped like animals, objects, or letters. They don't provide any extra functionality, but kids collected them, and they sold hundreds of millions. Its main virtue: that it always recovered its original shape, after wearing it on the wrist. They were invented by the Japanese Yumiko Ohashi and Masonar Haneda in 2002.
