Just Widgets Blog

1) Someone really did trade a paper clip (after 14 other trades in a year) for a house!
Wikipedia - One_red_paperclip
Original Site: http://oneredpaperclip.blogspot.com

There have been other seemingly crazy ideas that have had some success:

2) Student sells each pixel on his web page for $1.
1 million pixels sold = $1 million dollars.
Wikipedia Article: Milliondollarhomepage
Original Site: http://milliondollarhomepage.com

3) A Couple is raising funds for their wedding “one penny at a time”.
The project is in progress and has raised over $9,700 so far.
Wikipedia Article - Wedding_On_A_Penny
Original Site: http://weddingonapenny.com

4) A man flies from Colorado to New York City with $100 cash and an idea to market a tool and make $1 Million in a month. Although he didn’t succeed, he did get a cool website built (http://mymantool.com) and sold the idea on eBay for $3,700.
http://remifrazier.com - About

Why do these plans succeed? My thoughts:

1. The ideas get a lot of publicity on the web through the press and word of mouth (email, blogs, etc) which greatly increases the chance they will find either the right number of people or right type of people to help with their plan.

2. The ideas are new ideas (or at least fresh rehashes of old ideas). That of course plays into getting reason 1 to work in their favor. Copycats won’t do as well because, unlike a new application or some other functional thing, the main draw to these ideas is the novelty of the idea itself. I guess this helps explains why something like Google Search doesn’t have to be the first to market, it only has to be functionally better to have a chance at success. I don’t think anyone can come up with a “better” Million Dollar Homepage and do as well as the first one.

3. Three of the four ideas above have to do with advertising and marketing, which tap into the amazing benefits of scale. For more evidence of how advertising + scale = big results see how the 1% improvement = $100 Million/year at Google.

Are there any other reasons small ideas like these turn into big successes?
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