Crocs
this post was submitted on 15 Nov 2023
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On-line self training in programming..
Twitch. “Why would you pay to watch someone play a video game?”, I thought. Turns out, many enjoy it and it’s not too far removed from watching any sport.
I still don't understand why people want to watch people play video games. I can understand YouTube videos where you learn tips/tricks and walkthroughs, but just watching some kid play a video game. Like what?
I thought this was weird until I realized a lot of people grew up watching their older siblings play video games and never playing them. For some games that have a story line, it can be more fun than playing them. You also can turn it on as a background noise while doing something or to make friends to play with. You also can still use it to learn to get better specially as YouTube videos to learn can be better for the time but they may not show everything.
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This is what I think with sports. I enjoy playing football, basket, baseball, ... but seeing others play it has no point at all for me (of course I'm the exception here)
Not sure why you’re getting downvoted. I gather most viewers are financially starved and play what interests them vicariously through TTV/YT.
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Driving around flipping phones
Apple Watch… $14-18 Billions last year
Nothing Bundt Cakes. I vastly underestimated the appeal of a stand alone cake chain
Giving a realtor 6% of the sale.
Turns out I was right, it is a stupid idea.
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Sponge daddy. Its a sponge 🧽. Wildly successful. I’m the idiot
Uber! Step into a random stranger’s personal car and they’ll drive you home.
Sms (text) messaging. Genuinely couldn't see a reason why people would pay to send a written message rather than make a phone call. Couldn't have been more wrong.
Outback Steakhouse. I thought it was just a fad following the successful Crocodile Dundee movies. The very first one was in my city. It opened in a location that had been a restaurant graveyard and I figured that it would last a few months and then go away.
I basically invented the influencer model in the early days of twitter. It was a bit different tho. Hyper-local, I was going to represent the city/area and gain a following by posting events. My idea was that once I had enough of the city following the account(s), I could charge a few bucks to post maybe a restaurants specials for the night, or bring attention to a new business opening up. All while continuing to post events like concerts, comedy and workshops free to establish relationships and gain users. I was going to expand to a web page with a big calendar too, but social was step 1. It wasn't even really the focus if im being honest, it was the marketing plan
All I kept hearing from my mentor at the time was "nOonNeS gO1nG t0 pAy foR a TwEeT" (well, he was a boomer so it was a little bit different but im embellishing the quote for the post ok?)
My point is, if you have a vision, something that breaks the mold, the natural reaction from normies is going to be a bunch of reasons why it wont work. Push thru the noise, better to have failure than regret.
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I don't know if I found this dumb, weird or smart in the beginning but probably Free Water
These guys basically get sponsors to pay them to put their branding across 1000s of water bottles.
They then go to a specific area that matches their brands target audience and hand out all these bottles away for free. (Events, college etc)
Not only do the sponsors get exposure from street traffic but they actually get 100s of thousands, some times millions of views from the bottles in their viral TikTok videos
I never understood the benefit of early Whatsapp when SMS/ MMS could literally do the same thing, especially ob an iPhone (iMessage).
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Angry birds.
A million stupid flash games out there- why this one?
Why would someone buy something from online and pay shipping for it to come late when they could just go to the store. This was my impression of Amazon.com before they had prime shipping.
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Spinners
The iPad. Basically a gigantic phone that only acts like a phone if your actual phone is near it, yet requires equally gigantic iPants with iPockets to carry it. Now used as a toddler toy for my grandkids, especially in restaurants. The only time I have sincerely found one useful was this year when illustrating with Procreate.
i thought, back in the mid-90s, that the new business i read about that was selling books online was dumb and wouldn't make it. oops.. bezos made it and then some.
Lyft. John Zimmer pitched me an idea called Zimride back in the late 2000s it wasnt yet ride sharing, it was for employees and students to carpoool to work school together. If I remember correctly the valuation was $150k at the time. I was a CEO of a tech startup in the sustainability space and working with universities and big corps. John thought there was synergy. So did I, but I was focused on my own startup and passed on the $25k he was looking for to develop the idea.
Around 2014 I was watching CNBC one night and saw John on the TV I turned up the volume to find that my investment would have likely made me a billionaire. My startup failed by the way we raised $3M and the assets sold for 10k in 2014
Get into a stranger’s car, because the internet told you to…….
Uber