The next million dollar idea or billion dollar app, basically when an “ideas” person comes up with a brilliant idea to be the next Mark Zuckerberg because their new idea/app is GURANTEED to make a ton of money, but since they lack talent they just wish to spread this idea among others to show off their brilliance.
This all comes from an idea today a coworker of mine had that McDonald’s was losing A TON of money by not making a line of McDonald’s branded TV dinners. They’d come in various versions but the main one would have a McDouble, McNuggets, and Apple Pie all on one tray. Their reasoning was “Well Marie Calendars has their own line of TV dinners and they make a ton of money on it!”
But you haven’t explained why this is a dumb idea! I’m on the phone to Chris Kempczinski now, he says it had never occurred to him…
Seriously, what do you think the reason is? I guess an obvious thing is they carefully control the prep in their restaurants to achieve the desired consistent outcome, and a TV dinner would not be cooked in the same way, so it would be a fundamentally different meal. Does a different type of meal benefit from shared branding, or does it risk undermining the brand image of total consistency?
A mechanical calculator, so kids would get a real feel for numbers, man: see, instead of arbitrarily pressing buttons with as-you-like-it lightness, imagine having to push harder and harder to enter higher and higher numbers until you’re routinely anticipating results that already make sense!
Bonus points if you can guess what it was made of.
The only example of this I can think of was the guy who told me was invested in the patent for the resealable soda can. It was going to be the next big thing…about 8 years ago.
I think the problem with McD’s branded TV dinners is that bread freezes & reheats for shit. All their food is bun-based. It’s not a matter of procedural consistency.
Bob Evans is a midwestern chain of midmarket eateries. Big on mashed potatoes and other American “comfort food”. Who also do a booming business in what amount to TV dinners sold frozen in grocery stores.
Their dirty secret: What you get in the restaurant for 3x the price is those same frozen TV dinners heated on-site. All that “consistency” that idjit consumers love to demand is literally baked into the food at the factory. Whether you heat it at 325F for 22 minutes or they do, it’s the same product at home as it is at the eatery. And that product line includes no buns.
Assuming it would cost less than in-restaurant food, they would actually lose money because nobody ever says, “I would eat at McDonalds but for the cost”. It wouldn’t bring in many new customers, but it might drive current customers away from Micky D’s and toward the freezer section of the local Piggly Wiggly.
Also the idea of heating up three radically different things (a burger, chicken nuggets, an apple pie) at the same time and hoping they all warm up the same seems almost impossible.
They could put their brand on other types of foods if they wanted to. This probably comes up every few years and gets rejected for numerous reasons. Chief among them might be that frozen meals would compete with their restaurant sales. Even if frozen meals don’t infringe on their franchisees territorial exclusivity they depend heavily on franchisee loyalty to maintain their image.
If they could work out those problems it would without any doubt whatsoever be a world wide hit for at least 6 weeks. It might even be bigger than New Coke. Or in some dystopian future every meal that comes out of the machine has their logo on it.
Many years back, a friend of a friend tried to get me excited about his surefire business pitch: you call this company, and they come to where you’ve parked your car while you work and they wash and detail your car where it sits and when you come out at the end of the day it’s clean and ready.
I pointed out that some big employers already have this as a benefit, and he argued that you have to leave the car in a specific place in the parking garage and then come find it later. His big brainstorm was that you could park your car in its usual place, literally anywhere — garage, outdoor lot, on the street — and this service would come clean the car on the spot.
I asked him a few questions — so the cleaning crew is driving a truck with its own water supply? what if there’s no drainage? where does this truck sit so it doesn’t block traffic? wouldn’t it be easier to set this up as a valet type service where the worker just drives your car to a local washing site? — and it quickly became clear the guy had spent a lot of time Imagining the fantasy of walking away from a dirty car and then coming back later to a clean one, without thinking at all about the logistics of what happens between those endpoints.
He was so enthusiastic, and so annoyed that I didn’t want to buy in.
Years ago a guy told me his plan to make a fortune: a web-based business similar to eBay, except it would use barter instead of money. He seemed not to understand that money makes economic transactions efficient, because it’s fungible. He was also surprised when I told him that he’d have to do the work to make the business successful, that it wouldn’t be enough just to go to someone with his great idea and convince them to do it. Yeah, the guy was pretty dumb, and he was a jackass as well (I could tell you stories).
At some point a decade ago somebody told me his brilliant idea to get people excited for movies again. Choose Your Own Adventure films. The audience would all sit in their seats but the seat in front of you latched onto the back were two knobs. A regular movie would play but at certain points a decision would have to be made by the main character, and the screen would split vertically into two of a left choice and a right choice. If you wanted the left choice you’d touch the left knob and turn it left, and if you wanted right choice you’d hit right knob and turn it right. Then the choice that had the most votes would happen and change the movie.
The brilliance of this in his mind was that it encouraged multiple viewings to see all the choices, and if audiences kept picking a certain choice you’d bring friends with you to the movie theater and they would help sway the odds.
One day, at the golf course, the starter matched me up with another golfer. He was friendly enough, and our games were about the same, so it was fun for both of us.
At one point, he started what can best be described as a pitch. All he needed was one investor to go in with him, because he knew a guy who could turn a small investment into a large payoff. To make a long story short, the more he talked about it, the more I realized what he was describing: a Ponzi scheme.
Needless to say, I was not interested, and turned the subject back to golf, sports, cars, and other non-Ponzi inoffensive topics. We finished our round, had a couple of beers at the 19th hole, and said good-bye.
I haven’t seen him at that golf course since. Maybe he got involved in that Ponzi scheme, and can no longer afford to play golf.
Perhaps single McDonald TV dinners wouldn’t be big sellers, but I imagine with McDonald’s name recognition, they could dominate the boxed “Frozen Cheeseburgers in Grocery” category if they entered that market.
Maybe 6 frozen cheeseburgers per box would be ideal. Even better if they shrunk them to slider-size and sold them boxed by the dozen, 2-per pack. White Castle is doing quite well in that market and McDonald’s has stronger name recognition than them.
Sure, going through the McDonald’s drive-through is considered Fast Food, but popping a prepacked frozen burger in the microwave for 60 seconds is ultra-fast food.
Half of the idea is feasible; the guy who comes to clean my house windows brings his own water supply (in an IBC in the back of his van, connected to a pump and a really, really long hose reel).
But you’re right - if the car is parked on-street, how does the truck get to it without creating an obstruction? Also there’s a lot of wasted time and fuel in such an on-demand service, driving between individual cars to wash them in different locations.
The place where I used to work had a guy who turned up once every two weeks with X number of bookable slots to have your car washed in the company car park - that worked OK as he was making one trip to wash a number of cars, in an off-road setting.
Right, the point is not that there isn’t the germ of a workable idea in there, it’s that the guy had this unrealistic notion of the customer experience and wouldn’t be shaken from it.
An individual worker picking up your keys (and your car-park access card, if needed) and taking your vehicle to a regular washing service lot is something that might be feasible (with considerations for special insurance coverage for driving other people’s cars, and other stuff). I don’t know if there would be sufficient demand, but logistically it’s plausible.
But this guy was absolutely married to the idea of the car being washed on the spot. He objected to the valet-type premise because someone parked on the street would almost certainly not get their same spot on return.
The basic takeaway is that it’s not the initial idea of the business, it’s the hard work of thinking through and working out all the details of how exactly the business delivers its product or service in a realistic manner.
That’s often the core of many of these sorts of genius-but-not-actually-genius business ideas; someone with a perceived need that they think should be fulfilled in a very specific way that nobody else would ever want.