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Jake Zien was a 17 year old with a quirky idea for a flexible power strip. Ben Kaufman was a 19 year with a start-up and a vision of harnessing ideas just like Jake’s.
Now, thanks to Kaufman’s invention crowdsourcing site Quirky, Zien and other inventors like him are seeing their products go from sketchpad to store shelf faster than they can say “perpetual royalties.”
When Matt and Bryan Walls’s humor website “Snorg” failed, the venture left them with a lot of funny ideas from various brainstorming sessions. Rather than letting them go to waste, they put them on t-shirts and launched Snorgtees.com.
Initially capitalizing on movies like Napoleon Dynamite, Snorg Tees got rolling with pop culture. “Girls like guys with skills,” “Wish You were Beer,” and “I’d like to double your entendre” are just a few of their big sellers. Recent sales: over $5 million dollars.
In the latest episode of the Why Didn’t I Think of That? ® Podcast, Bob Smith and Greg Anastos sit down with thinkofthat.net blogger Benjamin Christopher and discuss the first of their Axioms For Entrepreneurs, “Re-think Your Industry.”
The Why Guys explore how companies like Netflix, Apple, Xerox, and General Motors were able to look at their industries, and their companies, in a new light.
When Seth Berkowitz was a junior at the University of Pennsylvania, he started baking cookies for friends out of his dorm. Soon, he noticed a trend: students got hungry late at night and there wasn’t any delivery alternative to greasy and heavy food. Berkowitz wondered, “Why not hot cookies and milk – delivered to your door after midnight?”
When inventor Doug Vick got up in the middle of the night and bumped into the bedpost, he wondered, “How many other people do this every night?”
So he invented high-quality double-lined fleece slippers with a weight sensor in the sole, a light sensor on the side, and an LED light in the toe.
What they do:
Market footwear that lets you navigate in the dark.
Inspiration:
When inventor Doug Vick got up in the middle of the night and bumped into the bedpost, he wondered, “How many other people do this every night?”
About the business:
Make and sell high-quality double-lined fleece slippers with a weight sensor in the sole, a light sensor on the side, and an LED light in the toe. When a person steps into them, they light their way – up to 25 foot ahead of them. The slipper run on replacable lithium batteries. The slippers have been a hit with J.C. Penney, Amazon.com and other retailers.
Here’s a mom-turned-entrepreneur who solved a common frustration that most of us just take for granted: Matching Socks.
Can you imagine ordering a book and having to wait while it was printed and bound? Of course not. But some small businesses across the country are starting to realize that having well-stocked inventories isn’t necessary for their business.
Every year there are hundreds of new inventions that make you want to scream, “Why didn’t I think of that?!” But the truth of the matter is, most of these inventions will never see the light of day.
Johnson, a former stock broker, took a $50,000 investment and turned “Big Feet Pajama Company” into a 2 million dollar a year company.
Just because the holiday is over doesn’t mean all the festivities have to end. I figured now was a perfect time for this story, out of the Why Didn’t I Think of That? vault.
