What business plan seemed so dumb to you but actually worked out?

Getting people to pay for digital media in the era of mass piracy (Spotify, Deezer, Netflix)
Starting a taxi company by ~~ignoring~~ frauding all the regulation related to taxi operation, ( Uber)
Tons of pseudo science like energy therapy which are not much different from straight up witchcraft.
A thought also for real estate developer who buy land in high-flood-risk area, and still manage to sell the houses, these ones also should be in jail
- The first one is pretty much down to, as Gabe Newell puts it, "piracy is a service problem". Spotify came along and (initially) provided a much better service compared to pirating your music at the time. Once they created the market segment, competitors started their own streaming subscriptions. I'd also say the Google music "upload 50,000 tracks for free" got a lot of former pirates to jump.
  Now the services are going through the same enshittification that most popular online services seem to be going through, we can see piracy increasing again. Someone will notice and fill the gap in providing a good service again at some point and the pendulum will swing once more
  
  I feel like you are going to hit a wall regarding streaming rights costs. Also, based on overhead costs and scaling, it will probably encourage fewer music streamers instead of more.
  
  IBroadcast is filling that "good service" niche. Upload your own music and stream it anywhere, ad-free.
- Starting a taxi company by ignoring frauding all the regulation related to taxi operation, ( Uber)
  TBF people also enjoyed parts of it that aren't regulation related, such as upfront cost calculation. Scamming customers is harder and even in those events, it's possible to get refunds.
  
  Yeah even in countries where Uber only works with normal taxi drivers, it's still much better than getting a cab from the street. It may have started with fraud but these apps actually provide a needed service.
- With Uber, they started with ride sharing and slowly nudged its way towards being a car-for-hire business. The reason it worked was because no one really liked taxis and didn't want to defend that monopoly.
  Today, cities are trying to regulate places like Airbnb to reduce their presence in major cities, but the only real hate towards Uber and Lyft has more to deal with employee pay.
  
  The difference is that Uber's model of using an app to show you the route, give driver feedback, be able to report problems and monitor and track the driver, etc. is actually a huge improvement to both rider safety and experience compared to calling a cab company and then waiting who knows how long for someone to show up and hopefully bring you where you want to go.
  Not saying that their model of gig workers, or dodging up front training is good, but they legitimately offered up a fundamentally better taxi experience than anything that came before, which I think encouraged regulators to really drag their feet on looking into them.
- Ah yeah, lots of pseudo-medicine falls into it.
  Of course water has memory.
  Of couse physically abusing your kid is healthy for it.
  Of course this quartz will help you.
  And then you actually strike gold with this shit and years later a well-known actress is selling candles that smell like her minge. Unbelievable.
- Don’t knock witchcraft like that. I have more faith in our witches than those pedalling energy-based solutions.

Running a conservative podcast that was more than 90% funded by RT while proclaiming a deep patriotism.

Netflix killing password sharing despite how easy piracy is. Massive increase in subscriptions
- Piracy is not as nice for average people. It requires effort many won't want to put in to discover what they want (and not in a shitty quality), and then managing and accessing that which you found takes a lot of effort as well to set up in a manner as easily accessed as a Netflix app.
  Most people can't/won't bother wasting their time and effort. They'll just pay for a service for the convenience. And before people interject with their anecdotes, convenience is subjective.
  
  Honestly in my younger years I had the time to hunt around for the right streams, rips, subtitle files etc, but it does take time and effort. For the price of a few sandwiches or a handful of coffees I don't have to spend the time doing that anymore.
  What's annoying is that it's not a single subscription anymore, it's 4-5 subscriptions which really adds up over the month.
- Younger people don't know how to use computers...
  
  Keep 'em dumb.
  I brought an DSLR to my office which caught the attention of some of my younger peers. They complained that the screen was not working. I was like "What did you guys do in 2 min? How did you mess it up?"
  Then they said "no no, the touch screen isn't working". I'm like "this isn't a touch screen device. You have to press buttons". They were mildly annoyed by that. I suspect this is the fault of iPhones and Android.
  Dumb down technology as much as possible but make people dependent on your ecosystem. Don't let users repair it. Keep it closed-source. No one-time-fee. Everything should be a subscription.
- I suspected Netflix to lose sub counts for two years after they enacted their 'No Account Sharing (outside the household).' policy. But it seems that they have been able to bounce back quite quickly, compared to my guess.

Someone once made a mountain of cash selling pet rocks.
- I have an official USB pet rock I got from a thinkgeek back in the day. Has a little box with air holes and everything.
  Exactly as functional as the original pet rock, but has a short USB cable attached.
  
  Was that one of their excellent April Fool's Day items? I looked forward to seeing the joke items they put out every year.
- I have a major curiosity about how this actually happened. I've watched a video or two about it but it still baffles me to this day that SOOOOO many people bought it as a x-mas present for their kid(s).
  I've wanted to learn a couple of things about this.
  A. What did the parents think of their kids asking for such a stupid present?
  B. What did the parents who refused to purchase a Pet Rock, have to deal with at home, when their kid(s) were informed that they were not getting one ever?
  C. (On the flip side of B.) What did the parents of those who did purchase them notice or deal with at home?
  D. What psychological reasoning would anyone have to desire to purchase a Pet Rock, instead of making their own?
  E. What psychological marketing/influencing was involved in this scheme?
  
  A. They were always more of a novelty gift rather than a child's gift.
  B. I was 12 when the trend hit and I had no desire to get one. Neither did my younger siblings.
  C. N/A as my parents didn't get me one.
  D. The novelty of a gag gift that was pre-packaged.
  E. That's the million dollar question.

All the ones where the idea was to "just start something, grow grow grow, then figure out monetization later" is wild to me.
E.g. reddit. It worked. CEO is rich, site is still online. Somehow they got investors probably, presumably.
I get not having profit. I get not having income, if it's in some prototype phase. But having no plan or idea whatsoever for how to monetize and still getting VC? Wild.
- I get not having profit. I get not having income, if it’s in some prototype phase. But having no plan or idea whatsoever for how to monetize and still getting VC? Wild.
  It's called "growth-first" or "growth-at-all-costs" strategy. I don't recall what video I was watching when I learned it, but it's a dying strategy for business now (IIRC). It had its rise in popularity in the late 2000s to about 2018. Think Netflix, WeWork, Uber, etc. These are huge businesses to prop up, so they (literally) bank on the idea that with a huge user base, they can sooner or later, make a profit to make it worth all of the risk.
- https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/
  Enshittification. Once you learn it, you see it everywhere. It’s depressing.
- Although to be fair these days that gig is over. Unless you have path towards profitability it’s very hard to unlock investment beyond seed.
  
  Do chatgpt and the like have a plan for profitability?
- Just curious about what does VC stand for, don't know anything about business
  
  venture capital. a group of investors with money who will put that money into promising companies so when it's successful you make more money back.
  
  Viet Cong. Bad news. Never get out of the boat.
  
  venture capital / investor cash cannons

The original SMS version of Twitter.
Later, the name hashtags, in American English this symbol #️⃣ was ~~always~~ best known as the pound key. It was also known as an Octothorpe.
Actually I still don't understand why anyone wants to use Twitter.
- Not always, it was an octothorpe before phones
- I don't get why people use Twitter as a social media platform, but the format is/was useful when you just want to see what a certain person or organization has said recently. Ex. Local DOT updates or a game studio during a server outage.
  That said, twitter has never figured out how to be self-sustaining, even before Musk implemented his air-tight nose dive strategy. And I'm not a fan of public orgs relying on a for-profit platform to communicate with the community. Especially when that platform retroactively decides you need to make an account and log in to view anything on it.
  So it's kinda the inverse of OP's question: I get why it's a useful idea even though it's not actually working out.
- Later, the name hashtags, in American English this symbol #️⃣ was ~~always~~ best known as the pound key. It was also known as an Octothorpe.
  The first time I learned of its American naming was the classic "pound quake 3 arena" audio clip from the #quake3arena IRC channel.
  "Uhhhhhh pound quake 3 arena"
  ".... What the hell was that?"
- (says Octothorpe) Reaction
- No, it's the symbol for a pound weight. Like: Apples, 5#/$2
  
  The £ key on GB keyboards is shift+3.

Taking off the pedals and training wheels of bikes and selling them to kids.
Wish I thought of that
- For real. I've seen kids years younger than when I started pedaling scurrying around on these, and it instantly clicked why it's a much better way to learn to stay upright on two wheels.
  I wish my first bike had been something like that. Training wheels stop a bike from leaning into turns, so they don't teach you anything about what it is like to ride without them.
  
  When I was learning to ride, my dad bent mt training wheels up so the bike would still turn and the wheels would only touch if you started to fall over a fair way.
- Strider wasn't the first to come up with balance bikes for kids specifically, they have been around for decades and balance bikes themselves, for a few hundred years.
  
  Balance bikes were the OG bicycle so they have it backwards.
  
  Didn't know. Felt like I wasnt seeing them until recently
- Fwiw these days balance bikes are considered better than training wheels for people learning to ride. Training wheels are ok if you actually need to go somewhere accompanied by an adult on a bike, but they’re terrible for learning. They don’t teach you how to steer or balance properly; a balance bike does. In fact, training wheels can teach bad habits that are difficult to unlearn.

The software company I work for is killing all legacy on-prem software in 2025 and replacing it with a modular AWS based system of single-page websites. Many customers are old-school and hesitant about anything cloud-related, but it worked out beautifully so far. The shutdown hasn't happened yet tho, so we'll see how many lawsuits roll in when it does lol
- Hey, as the saying goes, nobody was ever fired for running up an astronomical AWS bill.
  
  I’ve seen the exact opposite happen a couple of times: “How the fuck did you not realise you were spending 70 grand in a month?!”

Food delivery.
I never imagined a delivery service for restaurants with drive-thru would take off .
- I kinda get it, if you want takeout food and you can't or won't drive it could be convenient. But it's just so expensive.
  
  I realised that it was my bias as car owner.
  A good lesson about how all can have blind spots.
  
  I can make more money working during the delivery process than Id save by picking it up myself or taking time to cook.
- This is interesting to me. Drive through isn't very popular in the UK, I think there's a few KFCs and maybe McDonald's/burger king.
  But driving is such a pita I might as well cook or buy something from a supermarket if I'm going to do anything active.
  Unless I'm on the way back home from a commute perhaps? I don't really understand the business model. Also, what's wrong with parking and walking in to get it? Leaving the engine running and crawling forwards to a window and then waiting anyway, I don't get it.
- It's kinda good for people who don't have the time or the means to go pick up food, but don't mind paying almost twice as much for lukewarm soggy food

Linktree. It's just links on a page. How do you get people to pay a monthly subscription for that?
- Folks literally have no conept anymore that you can just slap HTML on a page. & with the advent of needing TLS, it starts to become more technical than a lot of folks want to bother learning & maintain versus the days of raw FTP uploads.
  
  Yeah but a basic Wordpress.com site could do exactly the same thing for free. Or for super cheap if you want your own domain.

Roblox. If you were there in the beginning then you know how empty it was. Now, that’s mostly what my son plays to what just make the most money/things? I don’t get it myself (I’m old, lol).
- They knew what they were doing. They knew that Minecraft needed a strong competitor in the video game market, and bet big on the 'long game.'
  Noticing that you are a parent of a person who plays Roblox, I feel obligated to share two investigative videos about Roblox Corporation practices or lack thereof, the exploitive practices they have to paying third-party in-game content "developers" (that are often kids/tweens/teens), and the issues Roblox have had with pedophiles/adults grooming young people/kidnappings.
  The following videos are from People Make Games on Youtube.
  Investigation: How Roblox Is Exploiting Young Game Developers
  Roblox Pressured Us to Delete Our Video. So We Dug Deeper.
  [Just so we are clear, I am not telling you how to parent your son or person. I am just informing you to the best of my ability, about the issues that have arisen on and off Roblox.]
  
  Appreciate the heads up. Will watch.

Buying rights to provide telecom service to an area and not actually providing service.
- Wait that's a thing? In TV broadcasting?
  I've heard of how Comcast Did New York state dirty many years ago. IIRC, they walked away with nearly half a billion dollars, which I believe was about 2/3 of all the money the state had given them to connect small towns and clusters of rural communities to DSL internet.>

Making a social network where people can send pictures to each other, then selling it to a big corporation for billions.
- Business Model is data mining... But back then it was poorly understood or believed not possible by the mainstream...
  Joke is on us 🤡

I never thought WeWork would succeed. Reasons:
the library was free to work at
they leased the property and then subleased it after rebuilding the inside
they offered free drinks, snacks, some places had gyms and showers too.
expanded very quickly and in LA had locations within a block of another.
They are still around. It's still around the same price to rent a desk for the day. But Regus, the actual property owner has their own desk rental service too.
- Makes sense to me. Open office designs SUCK. I share an office with 2 other people and I’m much, much more productive in my home office with 3 kids in the house because I can shut my door, be alone with my thoughts, and be productive.
- Are they still around though? I think they filed for bankruptcy. The jeezus wannabe ceo was a good con artist.
  
  Yeah, I was looking for a place to work at in Austin and there they were. Chose a local coffee shop instead

Buying massive amounts of primetime commercial time to sell useless products by screaming their name over and over in the ad.
- HEADON! APPLY DIRECTLY TO YOUR FORHEAD!
  Man, those obnoxious TV advertisements can all fuck right on. It was even worse that it was a homeopathic (aka placebo effect) topical product.
  
  But you remember it, and repeat it...
  They turned their advertising into a meme before memes were a thing. I'm sure someone has purchased the product based solely on the memeness, so successful ad?

Tupperware
Oooh. Wait.

there was this online bookshop that started selling, like, not books. and then they started selling their excess computer capacity?? and now they have rockets. from a book store. wtf.