Menu
On April Fools’ Day, everyone likes to play a few jokes and make their friends or colleagues look stupid. If we’re being honest, most of us will admit that it’s not just April Fools’ Day when we like to laugh at other people’s stupidity. Whether it’s political gaffes or celebrities getting caught doing dumb stuff, laughing at other people is a great way to make ourselves feel smarter and give us a sense of smug superiority.
Unfortunately for all us geniuses, sometimes it’s the dumbest ideas that succeed. While many of us repress our most moronic impulses, plenty of others out there act on them without inhibition—and make a lot of money!
In celebration of April Fools’ Day, here’s our tribute to some of the dumbest ideas that ever made money, and a few lessons on why it’s sometimes better to play the fool.
1. Gary Dahl and His Pet Rocks
So your friend comes to you with his big business idea. The problem: you want a pet but you don’t want the hassle of feeding, walking, bathing and generally looking after a small animal. He tells you he has the perfect solution. A pet rock! You don’t need to feed it, walk it, or even talk to it. It’s just a little stone with glued-on eyeballs that sits there on the shelf and watches you.
At first you think it’s a joke. Then you realize he’s serious. You tell him he’s crazy. You warn him not to sink his money into this terrible business idea. But that’s exactly what Gary Dahl did in 1975. “Pet Rocks” became a craze, and Dahl sold 1.5 million of the useless things. He became a millionaire in less than 12 months.
Not so crazy now, eh?
2. John McAffee’s Psychedelic Ascendency
Common sense would tell you that if you wanted to create a successful, multinational computer security firm, you should work hard, keep focused and stay on the straight and narrow. That might be true, but it’s certainly not how John McAffee went about it.
Working for Missouri Pacific Railroad on an early computer system in the ‘60s, McAffee would regularly drop LSD at work. One day McAffee got hold of a bag of DMT and snorted the whole lot. He wound up freaking out behind a trashcan outside the office, and perhaps wisely, never returned to work there.
McAffee got sober in the ‘80s, and famously founded his own anti-virus company whose shares skyrocketed after the Michelangelo virus created a media panic 1992.
McAffee sold his stake in the company for 100 million in 1994.
After the financial crisis decimated his fortune in 2008, McAffee left the country for an isolated area of Belize and became increasingly paranoid…but he’s still having more fun trolling the media and the FBI than you ever will.
3. Jason Sadler: The Human Billboard
In 2009, Jason Sadler set up a business with a pretty basic idea: companies pay him to wear their t-shirt. I know what you’re thinking. This is a pretty dumb idea. A company can print up a bunch of t-shirts and get people to wear them for free, why would they pay some guy to wear their t-shirt?
Actually I don’t know the answer to that.
But Sadler didn’t let the seeming stupidity of his idea get in the way of his success. Starting January 1, 2009, Sadler wore a different t-shirt everyday—and got paid. In his first year, he wound up making $83,000. Not bad for getting dressed in the morning. Sadler now employs a number of people in different states to wear t-shirts and has a high-profile client list that includes Starbucks and Nissan.
4. Zack Brown’s Potato Salad Party
In 2014, Zack “Danger” Brown set up a Kickstarter to raise $10 to make “potato salad”.
Despite the project’s vague goals and obvious low cost, Brown convinced nearly 7,000 people to back it and managed to raise over $55,000. That’s right, $55,000 for potato salad. Brown ended up making the potato salad at an event in Columbus Ohio where he raised an additional $18,000 in sponsorships. If you donated more than $10 to the campaign you actually got to watch him do it live.
Fascinating.
As of 2015, Brown is working on a potato salad cookbook. Only time will tell whether he can make a career out of his inane ideas.
5. Or Arbel’s Yo
Yo is a simple app that allows you to send your friends the word “Yo.” That’s it. You could just text “Yo” to your friend, but why would you when you can download an app to do it?
The app was coded by Israeli developer Or Arbel in 8 hours and launched on April Fools’ Day – perhaps even Arbel realized that the whole thing sounded like a joke.
Well, it may have sounded like a joke, but things got serious pretty quick. The app broke a million downloads in just four days and received over $2 million in funding. In 2014, Arbel quit his job and began working on the app fulltime.
Joke really was on us, I guess?
