Could have been, I don’t know. What I do know is that as soon as I heard the telltale signs of “Ponzi scheme,” it was time to change the subject.
“Yeah, yeah, money, investments, but we’re here to play golf. Nice shot, Buddy. That’ll play well from there. Hey, how do you like your Chevy Silverado?”
You get the idea.
I’d just about forgotten this one. Someone I know decided he was going to grow mushrooms to sell to restaurants. He even spent pretty much all the money he could spare to go to ‘mushroom school’. He was trying to make plans for his mushroom farm inside an old semi-trailer when I started asking him the basics, how many restaurants would buy them, how much would they pay, etc. He had no answers, hadn’t bothered to figure any of that out. By his reasoning learning to grow mushrooms and making a facility to do that in were the greatest challenges and once he’d accomplished that everything else would be easy. It’s been at least 5 years and he hasn’t grown a single mushroom.
There certainly are detailing services that come to your car. You just need to leave it in a place they can get to and park adjacent. Which is not on-street parallel parking. Nor in secured or pay-for parking facilities. But that still leaves many, many parked cars readily available to be cleaned. Probably over a million cars in my metro area alone, all day every day.
I always find it funny when someone talks about on-street parallel parking as a big obstacle to a national business. That clearly shows they’re thinking about the local slice of the USA they live in. We totally have it here in the Miami Metroblob. But is sure isn’t the norm, either in residential or in commercial areas.
The sort of people who pay to have cars detailed with any regularity are also the sort of people who drive the kinds of cars they really don’t want car washers driving on the street.
The real problem with all these “million dollar” ideas is that they are instantly duplicatable by anyone / everyone. The high-profit “goldmine” businesses are the ones where you can prevent instant competition.
There’s an acai berry store in about half the strip malls here in SoFL. With our large Brazilian expat population they’re very popular. Many non-Brazilians have gotten the habit. I enjoy them myself when I can find the places selling the authentic non-sweetened form.
The problem, as I alluded to above, is any given store is not a gold mine. Some are franchises, some are one-offs. All are in cut-throat competition with each other. They’re common enough that the only one(s) getting rich are the franchise company owners. Who need to be real businessmen to build the empire and the brand. Not passive investors who sold an “idea” for a lottery-scale payoff.
I once went to a meeting where a guy was pitching a business idea: I think he called it office coffee or something similarly bland.
The idea was to have a coffee shop that included conference rooms, with copiers, so people could also conduct business.
It struck me as discordant for two reasons. One, people seeking coffee want to get in and out, whereas meetings are for people who are going to stick around.
Also, coffee has a distinctive smell. Copier stores also give off a distinctive smell. I couldn’t imagine how well the olfactory experience would go.
A post was split to a new topic: HoneybadgerDC sock post
So maybe he WAS right!
So a coworking space with good coffee on-site? That’s not a blatantly idiotic idea, but you need to know what a coworking space is to know what industry you’re entering, and then figure out if “good coffee” is enough of a differentiator to matter.
Interactive movies have been done, but the mass vote nature of this concept could be a lot of fun or it could lead to fistfights. You know, the usual nature of parliamentary democracy. But probably not worth the costs, especially since it’s hard to make a narrative that’s actually branching, such that you have to make multiple films for the price of one, and make them all satisfying to experience. Even modern games tend to reel players in to a single path.
I had an idea that I thought would work, but everyone I mentioned it to just poked holes in my plan. I would employ a bunch of outgoing, attractive people who would stop in bars, coffee shops, fast food places, etc with their little suitcases. In the case there would be supplies to clean glasses and sunglasses as well as tools for minor repairs of same.
So, you are sitting in a bar having a drink. Someone enters the bar and announces they are there to clean and repair eyeglasses and sunglasses. It would be $1.75 a pair for cleaning. I assume people would tip, giving the person $2 or $3 dollars.
I (as the ringleader) would constantly be going around to all the places my team stopped at and talk with the owner/manager. Try to get them onboard about this revolutionary idea.
Personally, I like having crystal clear sunglasses yet I never take the time to clean them. I’d happily pay someone $2 to clean them. I don’t know if others would feel the same way.
I remember one guy trying to explain to me how publishing companies would make much more money printing individual books on demand rather than in big printing runs. He just refused to believe that economies of scale were a thing in the book printing business.
Don Lancaster advocated this 30 years ago:
Back in the early 2010s, I met a guy at a startup event who was working on a porn customizer. The idea was that you’d upload an image of a person you wanted to see having sex – a mainstream actor, public figure, or real-life acquaintance – and the platform would combine images of that person with existing porn footage to produce a sex scene featuring someone who looked a lot like your desired person.
At the time it didn’t seem like something that could be done at scale, and I don’t think his plan went anywhere. (I never encountered him again.) Nowadays with generative AI it’s probably almost too easy, so you’d never get anyone to pay for it.
A dental practice where all the hygienists and assistants are large-breasted, scantily clad women, a la “Hooters.”
Decades ago, I met a guy who had a “Million dollar” idea- a small, palm-sized device for keeping track of baseball stats. He wanted to have some type of touch-sensitive LCD to make it easy to use. I asked him how much he thought this device would sell for, and he said $20. I think I laughed - I told him that he was off by at least an order of magnitude. These were the days long before touch-screens were ubiquitous, and I’m not even sure it could be done at that price today…
I told him that the only way to even begin to approach that price would be to sell them in enormous quantities, far more than any reasonable estimate of the market.
I declined to take the project.
I didn’t know he passed away. The TV Typewriter Cookbook was an essential step in my career in computer hardware and software, and for uncounted more people in the early days of the microcomputer revolution. RIP Don.
I just googled Mobile Car Detailing, and came up with 6 local companies that provide this exact service.
Some of these ideas have serious potential for someone who would work hard to get a business started and find the financing to grow. Someone probably got laughed at a few times before his dumb idea for a mobile windshield repair business that now advertises ceaselessly as Safelite and is expanding the services they provide. They also clearly had business expertise in marketing and understood the needs of the potential customer base. Remember that thing about 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration? It’s true.
Back when DVDs first came out, there were rumors of a feature that would let you pick and choose which scenes would play. I thought that would be great for customization of porn. Film a whole lot of different scenes, then string together the types of scenes you personally like to produce a final porno just for you.
Now, of course, there’s an app for that. No need for a special separate device. He’s probably telling everyone that it was his idea first.
That makes me think of this scene from Futurama.
I remember there was a “Hooters-style” start-up haircut place where the women cut your hairs in bikinis but looking it up I can’t find any info about it, this was about 10 years ago.