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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:
Make Slinky Toys for Kids
Inspiration:
Richard James was working at a Philadelphia shipyard and was looking for a way to keep nautical instruments stable in rough seas. That’s when a torsion spring fell off the shelf. Richard watched the spring crawl down shelves, stacks of books and tabletops, and landed upright on the floor. He thought it might make a great toy for kids.
About the business:
Richard James founded James Industries and invented a machine that could coil 80 feet of steel wire into a Slinky within 10 seconds. He debuted the Slinky at Gimbel’s department store in 1945 during the Christmas holiday. He sold 400 toys the first 90 minutes.
What’s worse than a kid with a runny nose? A kid crying because his runny nose is red, dry, and rubbed raw from traditional tissues. Two creative moms realized this, and invented Boogie Wipes.
How two brothers built a van that turns any kids’ event into a hit. Games2U is a franchise that has been spicing up dull gatherings since 2007.
Sean Belnicks was possessed with the entrepreneurial spirit from an early age. By 14, Belnicks was already selling Pokemon cards on eBay. Perhaps it was only the logical next step to launch a website selling office furniture.
