17 Successful Startups That Seemed Crazy at First

17 Successful Startups That Seemed Crazy at First

Most will agree that it is possible to create a good startup with a good idea; however, great startups are often the result of ideas that seemed quite ridiculous at first. It is true that when an idea is obvious, the chance that someone already brought it to life is pretty big. Just think about how would you react to these ideas if you were a venture capitalist?

1. Facebook                                                                                 

The world needs yet another MySpace or Friendster, except several years late. We will open it up a few thousand overworked, anti-social Ivy Leaguers. One of the most successful startups so far.

2. Dropbox

We are going to create a file-sharing and syncing solution when the market already has tons of then and no one actually uses them even though they are supported by big companies like Microsoft. It will only do one thing well, and you will have to move all of your content to use it.

3. Amazon

We will start selling books, even though users are scared to use credit cards on the Internet. Their shipping costs will eat up any money they save. They will do it for convenience, even though they will have to wait a week for a book to be delivered.

4. Virgin Atlantic

Let’s start an airline company! How hard is it? We will differentiate with a funny safety video!

5. Mint

Give us your bank details, brokerage and credit card information! In return we will give it back to you with nice fonts! To make you feel richer, we will make them green. Ha!

6. Craigslist

It will look ugly, but it will be free!

7. Google

We are going to build the world’s 20th search engine at the time, when most of the others have been ditched for being money losers. We will strip out all of the ad-supported news and portal features so you will not be distracted from using the free search stuff.

8. GitHub

Software engineers will pay us monthly fees for the rest of their lives in order to create free software out of other free software. How does this sound?

9. PayPal

People will use their insecure AOL or Yahoo email addresses to pay each other real money, backed by a non-bank with a cute name run by 20-something.

10. Paperless Post

We are just like Evite, except you pay us.

11. Instagram

It’s all about the filters, folks!

12. LinkedIn

We will create a professional social network, but it will target the busy 30-somethings and 40-somethings! They will have to use once every five years when they will look for job offers.

13. Tesla

Instead of building batteries and selling them to Detroit, we will create our own car from scratch and own a distribution network during recession and cleantech backlash.

14. SpaceX

If NASA can do it, we can do it as well! After all, it’s not rocket science!

15. Firefox

We will build a better web browser, even though 90 percent of the world’s computers already have a free one built in.

16. Twitter

It is like email, SMS and RSS. Except it does a lot less! It will be used mainly by geeks at first, but then followed by Britney Spears and Charley Sheen.

17. iOS

We will create a brand new operating system, which does not run a single one of the million applications developed for Mac OS, Windows ot Linux. Only Apple can build apps for it. And we won’t have cut and paste!

Source: Mashable

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