What Are The Worst Business Ideas Ever?

[Kelsey McTavish]

What Are The Worst Business Ideas Ever?

[MacKenzie Brown]

I saw a list a while ago.

Google
We are building the world’s 20th search engine at a time when most of the others have been abandoned as commoditized money-losers. We’ll strip out all of the ad-supported news and portal features so you won’t be distracted from using the free search stuff.

Amazon
We’ll sell books online, even though users are still scared to use credit cards on the web. Their shipping costs will eat up any money they save. They’ll do it for the convenience, even though they have to wait a week for the book

Facebook
The world needs yet another Myspace or Friendster, except several years late. We’ll only open it up to a few thousand overworked, anti-social Ivy Leaguers. Everyone else will then join since Harvard students are so cool.

Twitter
It is like email, SMS or RSS. Except it does a lot less. It will be used mostly by geeks at first, followed by Britney Spears and Charlie Sheen.

Instagram
Filters! That’s right, we got filters!

PayPal
People will use their insecure AOL and Yahoo email addresses to pay each other real money, backed by a non-bank with a cute name run by 20-somethings.

LinkedIn
How about a professional social network, aimed at busy 30- and 40-somethings. They will use it once every 5 years when they go job searching.

Mint
Give us all of your bank, brokerage, and credit card information. We’ll give it back to you with nice fonts. To make you feel richer, we’ll make them green.

Dropbox
We are going to build a file sharing and syncing solution when the market has a dozen of them that no one uses, supported by big companies like Microsoft. It will only do one thing well, and you’ll have to move all of your content to use it.

iOS
A brand new operating system that doesn’t run a single one of the millions of applications that have been developed for Mac OS, Windows, or Linux. Only Apple can build apps for it. It won’t have cut and paste.

GitHub
Software engineers will pay monthly fees for the rest of their lives in order to create free software out of other free software!

Firefox
We are going to build a better web browser, even though 90 percent of the world’s computers already have a free one built in. One guy will do most of the work.

Craigslist – it will be ugly. It will be free. Except for the hookers.
Tesla – instead of just building batteries and selling them to Detroit, we are going to build our own cars from scratch plus own the distribution network. During a recession and a cleantech backlash.

SpaceX – if NASA can do it, so can we! It ain’t rocket science.
Source: The 18 Most Ridiculous Startup Ideas That Eventually Became Successful

Here is a few more,

A stranger with no license for a taxi drives you around – Uber
Rent a room to a random stranger – AirBnB

Every idea that works looks bad before, because no one wants to change.

I am not insulting anyone here or trying to insult anyone. Lots of times I meet with startup and the first thing that comes to my mind is that “It won’t work, ever” Most of them actually became a success. And I would want to slam my head against a wall.

Here is one more story for you.

Many years ago, on a pod casting platform, a startup was working . There was no traction in the project. They had a side project. There were 10 000 users for the project at the time. They decided to end their main project and focus more on their side project. If the investors want their money back, the CEO made an offer to all of them to buy back all the shares at cost. All the investors asked for their money back.

On the next day, the CEO decided to change the company name to Twitter.

Twitter was A BAD IDEA that some of the best investors in Silicon Valley believed.

Any idea can be good or bad.
You just need 3 things  – time, place and people. If you have all of the 3, any bad idea can become a good one.

You are the only person that can decide what you want to believe.

 

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