Have you ever struggled with a business idea trying to figure out if your imagination could land you to the greener side?
Take a look at these ideas that have made billionaires.
Santa Mail
It sounds difficult to imagine you can convince people that for $10 (Sh1,000), you can get a personalised letter from Santa Claus himself.
But if you’re Byron Reese, you know you can.
He founded a business that sends out mail to Santa believers – though, to be fair, they’re mainly children – over Christmas and birthdays, complete with stamps from the North Pole, Alaska.
Since founding santamail.org in 2001, Byron has sent out more than 500,000 letters, earning at least $5 million (Sh500 million).
Pet Rock
Would you buy a rock – a plain rock – at Sh400? Crazily enough, for most of 1975, more than a million people did.
Advertising executive Gary Dahl came up with the idea to sell egg-shaped rocks as pets, complete with care instructions, packaging that provided air holes for ‘breathing’ and obedience commands.
Gary says he came up with the idea as a joke, a play on the indulgences of the 70s. And it worked.He sold an estimated 1.5 million rocks, earning about $5 million (Sh500 million).
Rent A Chicken
There’s apparently a huge market for chicken renters when it comes to urban farming. There are people looking for a taste of the farm life, the joy of cooking freshly laid eggs.
So rather than their having to go through all the trouble of building a coop, buying chicks and feeding them to maturity to enjoy their eggs, they can rent fully-grown, productive chicken.
And when they realise they don’t want these birds pecking at their backyard and waking them up at dawn, they can return the birds to the farm. And all this for $370 (Sh37,000) per season for four hens.