3 Business Ideas You Wish Were Yours

There’s certainly no shortage of creative inspiration in the world when it comes to inventing a business around a single catchy idea – sometimes a single, crazed, why-would anyone-ever-use-this idea. If there’s one thing history teaches us, it’s that no idea is too off the wall, no pursuit too strange, when it comes to capitalism. For proof, we need look no further than the trusty Internet. Keep in mind, this stuff wasn’t hard to find. It took all of 15 seconds total.

The Wine Rack
We can almost guarantee that this wine rack is like nothing you’ve ever seen before. It’s basically an insulated bra with enough storage space built into the cups to hold a full bottle of wine or 25 ounces of your favorite beverage. A handy straw comes attached to the thing so the wearer can sip to her heart’s content no matter where she is. As one might expect, the Wine Rack is sells especially well to the college crowd but we have word that moms are wearing them to PTA meetings also. The true brilliance of this invention was the out-of-the-box thinking that combined two of the American males favorite topics, women and alcohol, into one wondrous package.

Shack Up Inn
The view of the lodging industry from here at the front end of the 21st century is that it’s all been done already; functional but boring is where it’s at. Mississippi tourism has taken an uptick lately though with the commercialism of the Blues Trail, which encourages genre lovers to plop themselves down and spend some money at various historical spots along the way. One of the most outstanding and inspired choices are to book a night in a sharecropper shack which has been transformed into a lodging facility. Don’t knock it if you haven’t tried it. The shacks have been refurbished to some extent and carry modern convenience of wi-fi, indoor plumbing, and air conditioning. The Shack Up Inn earned $15,000 during it’s inaugural year of 1998. With rooms going for $65 to $90 a night and public interest growing, the owners estimate they’re pulling in a few hundred grand a year.

Online Dating Assistants
Desperately seeking social and personal fulfillment but don’t have time to spend trolling the Internet for Mr. or Mrs. Right? You’re not the only one. Luckily, an enterprising young man created Virtual Dating Assistants (VDA), a service that uses your profile to cull the web for likely matches and send out greeting messages based upon the information you provide. No guarantees, of course, and the whole thing seems faintly…umm…wrong, but people are using it. For $600 a month, VDA dedicates 40 hours of account work and guarantees two dates. For $1,200, you get 80 hours of work and five dates.

There you have it. If only we all could be so brilliant.

The Bonus Commissions Team

Flickr / joiseyshowaa