Editor’s note: This article was first published in July 2012. The businesses and prices described, such as Ultime Réalité at €900 to 1,500 and My Excused Absence at $9.95, are as of 2012. These companies may no longer operate.
Continuing with some of the most striking and original business ideas created by bold, risk-taking entrepreneurs, today we’re showing several ideas that are up and running. We could say they’re not very common, or at least very few people would ever have thought they could make money with this kind of service.
The thing is, they have demand, little competition (or none in some cases) and they’re very profitable.
1. Extreme fun
I hope you remember the article “four possible business ideas taken from the movies”. In it, I encouraged entrepreneurs to give them shape, although they were aimed at a rather limited market. In France, someone has already copied one of them, based on extreme fun.
Ultime Réalité: this company emulates the extreme entertainment service from the film The Game, in which Michael Douglas was put through a situation where he didn’t know where the game ended and reality began.
The creators of Ultime Réalité offer their clients the chance to live through a kidnapping, a chase or any kind of extreme situation to push their adrenaline to the max. Clients can choose how intense they want the experience to be.
The company’s slogan is: “We make your dreams, or your nightmares, come true.”
Obviously they don’t use as much equipment and staff as in The Game, although they claim that for around €900–1,500 they can make you believe it’s no game at all.
That’s the French version. In the American version, where the idea originated, the client doesn’t choose: they receive it as a gift and are kidnapped without knowing it’s a game, so when they come back, as long as they haven’t suffered any psychological trauma, they’ll have learned what really matters in life. Those Americans…
2. Selling all kinds of excuses
Lots of people arrive late for work, others would like to skip it and others would like to leave a bit early. But what do you need for that? A good excuse, one that’s believable, not like the ones we showed in the ranking of the best excuses for being late to work.
Enter “My Excused Absence”, a company that sells all kinds of excuses for missing work, arriving late or leaving early. Mind you, the company is professional, so it gives clients exact copies of medical certificates, court orders summoning you as a witness, notes from a doctor, a dentist and so on.
For $9.95 you can buy medical notes, and they throw in a bonus of “50 excuses to get out of any situation” (for now only in the United States). The founder of this business says his first customers were mostly university students trying to postpone exams with completely believable excuses, and later demand started coming from employees of companies of all sizes.
3. Perfumes made from your DNA or a celebrity’s
A British company, My DNA Fragrance, lets anyone wear a completely unique perfume, because it creates the fragrance from their own DNA. The price is around €100 a bottle.
Of course, among its luxury products, it gives you the chance to smell like Madonna, Paul Newman or any celebrity, even one who has died, as long as their DNA is in the database. All they need is a hair, a piece of fingernail or some saliva from anyone to extract the DNA and create the perfume.
The obsession with personalising our DNA in some way is creating very profitable businesses. Along the same lines, we previously wrote about a company that makes a portrait of your DNA for you to hang in your living room, put on your bedside table or wherever you like.
We could also include in this type of business other ideas we’ve already covered, such as:
- Selling tobacco legally without paying taxes: four American entrepreneurs came up with a way to sell tobacco (without actually selling it) at a lower price than tobacconists, by exploiting a legal loophole.
- Selling cannabis legally: in the same way, several entrepreneurs have opened shops of this kind, and some are even franchises.
- Nap bars: something as ordinary as the siesta in Spain has become an amazing, luxurious ritual in other countries, where people even pay for it.
As we can see, it’s a matter of letting our imagination run wild.
See also: The worst business ideas (that somehow made their creators millionaires)
Featured image: Fab5669, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
