According to a recent study, more than half of Americans want to become entrepreneurs. Unfortunately, only a small percentage of them will live to see this dream come true, because some ideas are not. Or they?
Although some ideas don’t seem right for today’s business environment, the world is constantly changing and people’s needs are constantly changing. This means that a strange idea that can never exist today can become a Fortune 500 company in a few years or decades.
No one can predict the future, no matter how many years of experience or millions of dollars of investment. Finally, it is always up to consumers to decide what they can persist and what they cannot, and their choices, no matter how surprising, shape the world as we know it.
Today, the popularity of some companies is self-evident, but when they were conceived, these concepts were so unbelievable that investors either chose not to bet on them or sold their stocks too quickly, thus making me lose billions of dollars. If they were more patient and trusted the founder, they could have the net worth now.
These are some of the best examples of how a seemingly “bad” idea can become incredible.
Snapchat
The purpose of taking pictures is to capture the moment, so it seems counterintuitive to want the picture to disappear after a few seconds. Despite this, the three colleagues from Stanford University did not think so and decided to follow his ideas.
Facts have shown that people have already said that although the founder’s concept is not completely in line with common sense, in less than a year, Snapchat processed 25 images per second. To this day, we all know this application and there is no doubt that people do want the option of disappearing the images. In fact, there are 265 million of these people, the number of daily active Snapchat users in Q4 2020.
PayPal
There are many things that humans care about, but at the top of this list is money, more specifically, our own money. This is why most people are reluctant to give their life savings to complete strangers, especially when the technology behind a new invention is relatively obscure and hardly available to the public.
Despite this, there are still some people who boldly launched Internet banking, but many people have not heard of it. Sharing the confidential information necessary to legally open bank accounts and money with strangers may not seem like the best idea, but some novelty seekers decided to try new services. Today, PayPal has revolutionized the banking industry, accounting for 14% of online payments.
Amazon
Many people will be completely satisfied with a good job that pays the bills and allows them to pursue their passions, but Jeff Bezos will not. In 1994, he quit his job at DE Shaw, a quantitative hedge fund in New York, and switched to selling books on the Internet. At that time, only a few people, such as scholars, knew about it, and they used it for research. It is not available to the general public.
In an interview with David Rubenstein, Bezos recalled how his family asked him what the entire Internet was. But this did not stop Bezos, he knew this was a feasible idea, and the public would eventually see its potential. Even after the stock crash in early 2000, the price dropped nearly ten times, and it seemed to indicate that it was not an online bookstore after all. The company rebounded and is now the second-largest bookstore in the world.
Crocs
The fashion industry is worth US$2.5 trillion. Over the years, we have seen many brands trying to get a share of the pie, some of which have even become household names. Of course, fashion is subjective, but everyone on the Internet seems to agree on one thing: Crocs is not the most beautiful footwear on the planet, coupled with relatively high prices, this idea should fail. .. But the fact is far from the case. The biggest downside to the company turned out to be the real reason people bought it. In the past year alone, the company’s stock price soared more than nine times. Combined with the discovery of various celebrities using wooden logs, although people may be talking about looks, alligators seem to be talking here.
Uber
Taxi has been around since the 17th century before the first automobile was invented. Although the idea is old, one thing that has not changed is the person designated as the driver. Our sense of security for them eventually allowed us to get in the car, even if they were complete strangers. So what if you remove this trust factor and instead provide people with cheaper transportation services, which may involve more risks, what should you do?
This is exactly what Uber did in 2009. Although our parents told us never to get in a car with strangers, the company has achieved great success with its innovative services. Even after the boycott surrounding the initial public offering, the company continues to perform well and continues to hold a strong position as the largest taxi and limousine company.
Letting the public decide
While it is definitely not an easy task to come up with an idea that will appeal to the public and then turn it into reality, we tend to think that just because someone in our inner circle won’t appreciate it. the idea, others will also give you a pass. The fact is, of the more than 7.5 billion people, some will definitely like what you create, and there may be enough people to turn it into a viable market.
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