16 Most Ridiculous Startup Ideas That Become Successful

15.24 0 Comments A+ a-

In the world that changing so fast, many people want to solve other people's problem. Accelerate by technology, they want to make other people's life get easier. While they solve some problems, they also have the willingness to earn money from what they're doing. Those people we talk about mostly solve people's problem by product or company and we often used the terms 'Startup' to call them.


Img source: The NextWeb

So what startup really stands for? Is their main focus is solving the problems, or their focus is just to earn money? Well, in my point of view, A good startup ought to know these 2 points. They need to find the problems that really matter, in the other hand, they also need to find the good business model to earn some cash for what they're doing.

So, we see many startup raise and fail while others getting bigger and bigger and become the unicorn startup. Do you ever wonder what were the most ridiculous startup ideas that become successful? 

Well, it's not about how crazy the ideas is. It's all about how much effort you have to push yourself digging those ideas into reality. 


Here are 16 Most Ridiculous Startup Ideas That Eventually Become Successful



  • Facebook - the world needs yet another social network a la 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 follow since Harvard students are so cool.
  • Dropbox - we built a file sharing and syncing solution in a market has a dozen of them built by big companies like Microsoft. It only has one feature, and you have to move all of your content to use it.
  • 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.
  • Virgin Atlantic - airlines are fun, so we are starting one. How hard could it be? We'll differentiate with a funny safety video and by not being a**holes.
  • Mint - give us all of your bank, brokerage, and credit card information. We'll store them on the web and give you the data back but with nicer fonts. To make you feel richer, we'll make it all green.
  • Palantir - we'll build arcane analytics software, put the company in California, hire a bunch of new college grads, many of them immigrants, hire no sales reps, and close giant deals with D.C.-based defense and intelligence agencies.
  • Craigslist - it will be ugly. It will be free. Except for the scammers and hookers.
  • iOS - we are shipping a brand new operating system that doesn't run a single one of the millions of applications that have already been developed for Mac OS, Windows, or Linux. Apple has to approve all of the apps, and it won't have cut and paste to start with.
  • Google - we are building the world's 20th search engine at a time when most of the others have been abandoned as being 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.
  • Github - software engineers will pay monthly fees for the rest of their lives in order to create free software out of other free software!
  • 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.
  • Paperless Post - we are like Evite, except you pay us. All of your friends will know that you are an idiot the minute your faux-parchment digital envelope hits their inbox.
  • Instagram - who needs Facebook? We got filters! That's right, filters!
  • 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.
  • 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. We'll start the company during a recession and the crashing of the clean tech industry.
  • SpaceX - if NASA can do it, so can we! It ain't rocket science. Oh, it is.
  • 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. It's based on a product that a single college student built.
  • Twitter - it is like email, SMS, or RSS. Except it only has 140 characters, doesn't support images, can't be made private, and will be used mostly by geeks at first, followed by Britney Spears and Charlie Sheen. (source)