- Never think your business idea is too dumb to work. The dumber it is, the richer you might get.
They say it’s not stupid if it works. But what if it’s stupid and doesn’t really serve any kind of a purpose?
If it makes you a millionaire, we suppose that’s still pretty good.
Sometimes people come up with the most ridiculous and pointless inventions, but still manage to make an absolute ***load of money from it. Maybe it’s good marketing or maybe we’re even stupider for buying these products, but it just keeps happening.
Here are eight products that are incredibly pointless yet still earned people millions of dollars.
8. Shake Weight
You’ve probably seen the Shake Weight ad — and if not that then one of its countless parodies. The Shake Weight is a modified dumbbell that makes you look like…
Well, like you’re playing with something phallic.
And it doesn’t work. The Shake Weight is less effective than regular exercise and burns fewer calories than walking.
Yet it still has earned its creators more than $40 million.
7. The Million Dollar Homepage
A pixel isn’t much. Just a regular 1080p display — like that you probably have on your phone or computer — has more than two million of them.
In 2005, 21-year-old British student Alex Tew created a website consisting of a million pixels. So yeah, that’s less than half of the pixels on your screen.
He advertised that he would sell the pixels off $1 a pop. The website earned him a million dollars.
6. The Smiley Face
You know the yellow smiley face. It was created in 1963 by Harvey Ball, who was paid $45 for it.
Ball isn’t the one who got rich off the design, though, since he never trademarked it. Brothers Murray and Bernard Spain bought the rights to the smiley face and started the SmileyWorld company.
Within a year and a half, the brothers were worth $50 million. Today, the smiley face creates $250 million in profits — every single year.
Pretty good for a $45 initial investment.
5. The Snuggie
Have you ever heard anyone say anything positive about the Snuggie? This blanket with sleeves gets about as much flak as Crocs.
The ridiculous ads for the Snuggie didn’t help its reputation one bit. By all logic, this thing should’ve crashed and burned.
But here’s the thing — the stupid marketing strategy was a carefully crafted ploy. The Snuggie’s creator, Scott Boilen, knew his product was ridiculous so he decided to lean hard into it.
And it worked. To this day, Boilen has made a sweet $200 mil out of the stupid blanket — at least.
4. Beanie Babies
Oh boy, Beanie Babies. What is it about these things? They’re not really any different from any other plushie.
Yet people went absolutely nuts about them. Part of that was clever marketing. Their creator, Ty Warner, decided to sell the plushies only in small independent stores instead of big toy chains, creating artificial scarcity.
As the Beanie Baby craze shows, people ate it up. Having launched in 1993, Warner’s company made $700 million in just one year.
By 1999, they were raking it in at an annual rate of $1 billion. Guess people want what they can’t easily get, even it if it’s just a plushie.
3. iFart
The early smartphone era really was a Wild West for software developers. You could make basically any app and throw it on the Apple App Store.
That’s what Joel Comm did. He created iFart — an iPhone app that makes a fart sound when you press a button. He started selling the app for $0.99 in 2008.
The app spent weeks at the #1 spot of the App Store’s best-selling apps. Then it fell to #2 and we don’t think anyone has recorded how long it stayed there.
Today, iFart is among the Top 20 best-selling iPhone apps of all time. While we don’t have an exact number of how much money Comm has made from the app, he was bringing in $10,000 a day when iFart was at its most popular.
Conservative estimates say Comm has made at least a couple million off the app — that makes fart noises.
2. Head On
Shake Weight commercials were stupid, Snuggie ads were ridiculous… But then there was the Head On ad.
It’s amazing how bad this commercial is. It doesn’t even tell you what Head On does — probably because it doesn’t do jack.
The stuff is supposed to relieve headaches, but it’s just wax. There’s nothing in it that could even remotely help with a headache.
But its sales grew by more than 200% immediately after the irritating ad went on air. In just 2006, the producer Sirivision earned $6.5 million from a product that literally does nothing.
Apply directly to the forehead.
1. Pet Rocks
This is it. The most pointless, useless product ever made. And it turned its inventor into a millionaire.
The Pet Rock is exactly what it sounds like. It’s a rock with googly eyes glued to it. You could probably make one yourself for less than a dollar.
But Gary Dahl, the creator of the Pet Rock, sold them in 1975 for $3.95 per rock. And for a brief period of time, people went nuts for them.
The fad didn’t last long, probably because people realized that the Pet Rock is literally just a rock. But Dahl sold nearly five million of them in their launch year.
The man earned more than $15 million by selling rocks. Was it his idea that was stupid, or were we stupid for buying into it?