….the untaken path to insane money
1. I can has Cheezburger?
On one of the direful Mondays, Erik called up his friend Kari for some long venting. In an attempt to cheer her pal, Kari sent a picture of a funny cat (taken from a Russian cat food ad) and whimsically added the caption “I can has Cheezburger?” over the picture. Erik found it funny and wanted to put it on the internet and share it with his friends. On the spur of a moment, Erik purchased a domain and posted the cat meme. It immediately took off and stole the Internet’s heart, was roughly shared 352 jillion times. They were only intending to post that one picture, but it was such a hit that Kari and Eric created a series of similar photos of Professor Happy cat's adventures in obtaining the Cheezburger. That one meme served as a cornerstone for an army of websites, ultimately earning the creator Erik Nakagawa a fortune of 10 million dollars.
2. “ Pizza.com”
Chris Clark, who owns a software company registered the URL Pizza.com for $20 back in 1994 when the internet was just starting. Nothing constructive really came of the domain, so he decided to run random pizza advertisements. During the go-go days of the Internet, hopeful companies and entrepreneurs snapped up easy-to-remember, generic domain names with the expectation that they would translate to boatloads of cash — or even a heady IPO. Clark heard about some such fortuitous sales and decided to try his own luck. Clark’s Pizza.com auction was held by Sedo.com and made him a whopping 2.6 million dollars. It’s still uncommon to think a single generic domain name could rake you millions.
3. Weird new pet
If this isn’t the craziest way of becoming a Millionaire, I don’t know what is.
There have been all sorts of pretty to weird-looking toys from time to time. But among those, stands tall or perhaps “sits small”- THE PET ROCK
Selling a rock. Everything about it sounds ridiculous but one man decided to make millions with this idea and it worked. Gary Dahl, a former advertising executive sold rocks (as hassle-free pets) in old-school cardboard boxes with a complete pet training manual as a complimentary. The perfect pet, according to Gary Dahl, would never need to be fed or walked. It would never require a trip to the vet or groomer. And, oh, it would never, ever die. Certainly, no cat nor dog fulfills these rigid requirements… But a rock does!. After a pet carrier, the rocks were an instant hit and he made fifteen million dollars in just the first six months.
4. Selling Secrets
Secrets are the currency of intimacy
The genius Frank Warren created PostSecret, a community mail art project, in which people send their deepest, darkest secrets anonymously on a homemade postcard. The top selected secrets are then posted on the PostSecret website every Sunday since 2005. Some of the secrets are even used for PostSecret’s books and Warren made his millions by selling six compilation books over the years.
5. YO
The yo app. It is a social media application created by an Israeli developer in 8 hours and launched on April Fool’s Day in 2014. Indeed, starting a social media platform is among the most high-profile pathways to a million-dollar bank account, but this one platform may have slipped surreptitiously through the social media market. With Yo, you can tap a button and send any of your friends, so long as they have the app downloaded, too, a “Yo” message. That’s it. That’s the whole app. It was super simple and the developer himself admitted in an interview, the whole concept behind it was stupid, but made him millions.
BOTTOMLINE: If anybody tells you “Your idea is stupid”, you’ll most probably HIT IT OFF!.