Here are some of the most interesting ways people got rich!
9 - Snuggie Let’s be honest.
Most of us get sucked into infomercials.
Having the late Billy Mays screaming about some product that will change our life will
always get us to watch the entire commercial, or at least to the, “but wait let’s more!”
part.
However, with the snuggie, it was different.
On paper, the Snuggie should never have been the success that it is.
They look like pajamas for members of a secret society.
But either because fate sometimes rewards really weird ideas or because the snuggie
was the work of a secret genius, but it made Scott Boilen, creator of the snuggie, very
rich.
The main reason why the Snuggie sold so well was because of the ridiculous commercials.
The marketing team knew that the product shouldn’t be taken too seriously so they made the commercials
extra cheesy.
Celebrities such as Jay Leno, Daniel Tosh and Ellen Degeneres all made parodies of the
commercial.
Millions of Snuggies were bought and given as gag gifts.
Do you guys know how many snuggies were sold in the first year of its existence?!
The answer will be later in this video!
8 - Cameron Johnson Before nerdy teenagers became millionaires
by creating apps, they became millionaires by selling beanie babies.
Well, okay, at least Cameron Johnson did anyway.
Johnson must have been born with some entrepreneurial skills.
That’s because In 1994, at only nine years old, while his friends were probably playing
Super Nintendo, he launched his first business making and selling greeting cards.
After saving up a few thousand bucks by age 11, he bought his sister’s beanie baby collection
for 100 bucks!
He earned ten times that much selling the dolls on eBay.
While his sister learned a brutal yet valuable lesson about how capitalism works, Cameron
realized he was on to something.
He began contacting Ty directly to buy Beanie Babies at a wholesale price, then flipping
them for profit on ebay.
In other words, doing what every single retailer who sold those things at a huge markup did,
except he had virtually no overhead.
That little venture banked him around $50 grand, which is a lot of money for a 12 year
old.
Actually, that’s a lot for many adults!
From there Cameron launched an email forwarding company called My EX Mail.
After that he and some other guys launched an online ad company called surfingprizes.com.
By the time he graduated high school, he was a millionaire!
7 - Aaron Krause The name “Scrub Daddy” could mean any
number of things, and to be honest, it really doesn’t sound that flattering.
However, Aaron Krause doesn’t mind it at all!
Krause's story in many ways embodies what it means to be a successful entrepreneur in
the 21st century.
The roots of Scrub Daddy starts actually with cars.
Krause had his own business detailing cars and he invented his own line of buffing and
polishing pads.
He later sold his line to 3M, but they didn’t buy his sponges because they had their own
sponges called scotch-brite.
This left Krause with a ton of unused sponges.
Five years later, Krause just happened to use one of his leftover sponges to do the
dishes, and inspiration struck.
After a marketing campaign landed him on Shark Tank, Krasue made his pitch with a sponge
that looks like a smiley face.
He claimed to have invented the greatest kitchen sponge ever.
By becoming harder or softer depending on the temperature of the water, the scrub daddy
was way better than the everyday sponge.
And he was right.
His live demo got Lori Greiner to offer 200 grand for 20% equity.
By 2017 Scrub Daddy had revenues of over $100 million dollars and it’s still the biggest
success ever for any Shark Tank product!
6 - Million Dollar Homepage
In 2005, Alex Tew was just a dude from England who needed help paying for college.
So he decided to launch a website called The Million Dollar Homepage.
The website had 1 million pixels for sale, and the goal was to sell each of the pixels
for $1.
In the end, Tew made over a million dollars with his simple idea.
$1,037,100 to be exact.
Tew was 21 years old and preparing to go to North Nottingham University for business school.
However, he was worried about student debt.
So he figured, why not raise a million bucks?
Of course, it’s easier said than done.
Each of the pixels on the webpage were be sold to a business or individual who could
place their own image, slogan and hyperlink, whichever they wanted.
Pixels were sold in 100 x 100 blocks, meaning that each advertiser was paying a minimum
of $100 dollars.
After some of his friends and families bought the first few thousand pixels, things began
to pick up.
The BBC picked up one of his press releases and from there the page went viral.
Demand was so high that he had to auction off his last 1,000 pixels on eBay.
That’s where the extra money came from.
All Tew did was sell ad space with a little twist; he didn’t exactly need to reinvent
the wheel to raise his million bucks!
5 - MyExcusedAbsence.Com
We’ve all played hooky from work, school and other obligations.
And we all most likely needed an excuse.
That’s why when MyExcusedAbsence.Com came out, it was a genius and funny idea even if
it’s helping people make up lies.
When the website was up and running, it offered an array of fake documents excusing negligent
employees and students from their obligations.
Doctor’s notes, jury summons, or even a fake note saying you were at a funeral.
With regards to the latter, just ask George Costanza how things worked out for him when
he tried that one!
The fine print at the bottom of the website stated that the notes could be used for “Entertainment
Purposes Only” which presumably was their attempt at providing legal cover for themselves.
Today the website isn’t up and running.
Shocker, right?
But for a while, the founder of the website launched the scheme for just the price of
registering and hosting the website and was getting roughly 15,000 hits per month.
4 - I can has Cheezburger?
One day Eric Nakagawa and Kari Unebasami decided they’d share a photo of a absurdly chubby
cat with the caption “I Can Has Cheezburger?” in a style popularized by posters from the
forum, 4chan.
The photo of the cat, which is actually kinda funny, inspired the two accidental entrepreneurs
to create the website.
Because clearly the public wants to see more photos of random cats with funny captions
right?
After posting several more images and getting more responses, that’s when Nakagawa decided
to convert the website to a monetized blog.
And they both became millionaires because I can has cheezburger dot com ended up being
a huge success.
Fan submissions of cats with funny captions plus the community aspect made the site wildly
popular.
With 35 million visits per month and thousands of daily submissions, the site became highly
profitable, and Kari and Eric sold the domain for $2 million bucks to entrepreneur Ben Huh.
Not too shabby for just making a website with cat pictures right?!
3 - Stefan Mandel
The odds of winning the lottery are low.
Winning multiple times is an even lower number.
Enter Stefan Mandel.
This Romanian Economist won the lottery 14 times!
And it wasn’t by luck!
Born in communist Romania, Mandel decided poverty and oppression wasn’t his thing
and he moved to Australia by way of Israel.
But first, he won the lottery in Romania twice by creating an algorithm to guess five out
of six winning numbers in the lottery.
That gave him enough money to move to Australia where he won the lottery 12 more times!
To make a long story short, he basically set up a lottery business.
He had a team of buyers that helped him buy as many lottery tickets as possible, which
lead to him winning the lottery 12 times.
Of course, the winnings would be split among him and his investors.
Each time he won, the government enacted new rules or laws that they hoped would put a
stop to his very successful lottery operation!
After his 12th win, so many laws had been passed that it became hard for him and his
team to continue their lottery business without getting in trouble.
So he moved to Virginia, where his planning led to his final win in the Virginia State
lottery in 1992.
Essentially, the jackpot was 27 million dollars.
There were only 7.1 million possible combinations.
Yep, Mandel and his investors bought roughly 6 million tickets.
They won the lottery and split it up for one last final payday.
Experts today say his model can’t be replicated because there are just too many rules enacted
to prevent a group like Mandel’s from winning.
2 - Pet Rock
This list wouldn’t be complete without the Pet Rock.
C’mon.
Rocks are everywhere.
If you want one, they’re all over the place right outside.
But Gary Dahl still managed to become a millionaire by selling pet rocks to the public.
In 1975, Dahl listened to his friends complain about their pets.
He suddenly had an idea.
He had a perfect "pet" for everyone!
A rock!
He took smooth rocks from Rosarito Beach in Mexico, boxed them up, and sold them for $4.
They were marketed as pets, and the rocks came in custom made boxes that had holes,
as if it had a real life pet in it.
An "instruction manual" also came with the rock, and it was filled with jokes that referred
to the rock as an actual pet.
In a six month span in 1975, more than 1 and a half million pet rocks were sold, making
Dahl a millionaire.
The same people that bought pet rocks probably would have bought a snuggie as well!
And that brings us to the answer to our poll question earlier which was what’s the number
of snuggies sold in its first year out?
20 million!
1 - Frank Warren Are secrets lucrative?
Of course!
For Frank Warren of PostSecret, it’s very lucrative!
The whole concept behind PostSecret was basically to let people tell secrets that they desperately
want to tell SOMEone.
People mail in their secrets on postcards, and the postcards are posted anonymously on
a blog ran by Frank Warren.
Every morning Warren sifts through postcards revealing people’s secrets, and each Sunday
he posts about 20 of them on his site.
What started out as an experimental art project and voyeuristic guilty pleasure, has turned
into a career for Warren, beginning in 2005.
To date he’s seen somewhere around a quarter million secret postcards where people share
some of their wildest secrets.
For example, one of the latest secrets was quote “I’m in my sixties, but I love to
send my old high school boyfriend photos of what he did not get to see back in 1967.”
Ayyyyye, grandmas have secrets too!
Warren refused to make money the traditional route, monetizing the blog with advertising.
When you consider that some 200 million people have visited the blog….that’s pretty surprising.
Instead he “only” makes money from book sales and speaking fees.
Warren says he uses this approach so he can keep his product staying pure.
Here’s what’s next!