Editor’s note: This article was first published in August 2010. Messenger and Tuenti no longer exist, and platforms such as Facebook and Google have since added their own memorialization and inactive-account tools, which affects the novelty of the idea.
The ideas Americans manage to come up with never cease to amaze me. As we can all imagine, people dying doesn’t usually make anyone very happy, but that doesn’t stop funeral homes from being a very lucrative business in purely financial terms.
The Americans go one step further and offer a truly original service. It’s one more example of how a simple idea can turn into a big business.
Imagine that one of the people you chat with on Messenger, Tuenti (a Spanish social network), Twitter or Facebook, someone you’ve been talking to for months or even years, suddenly disappears one day and you never hear from them again. You don’t know whether you said something in your last conversation that upset them, or whether they’ve simply fallen ill or had their password stolen.
Now imagine that, God forbid, something happens to you. How are you going to let your online friends know? After all, as a rule the people we meet online have nothing to do with our everyday circle of friends.
An American company will now say goodbye on your behalf if you die. It will let each of your contacts know that you have passed away and hold what it calls an “online funeral” with your last words.
While you are still alive, the company records your testimony: you write down everything you want to say to each of the people you put on a list. The company keeps this list in a database along with all your social media accounts and their passwords, under an extremely strict privacy policy.
Anyone who thinks it’s a crazy idea is right, but it’s a crazy idea for which the company charges about €20 a year, and it already has 600,000 users who have signed their last wishes online. Some simple maths shows that this company takes in around €12 million a year.
I encourage you to put this idea into practice in Spanish-speaking countries. Even if you only got 50,000 users and charged €10 a year, an income of €500,000 wouldn’t be bad at all.
Further reading
- Business ideas related to love
- Business ideas around personal care and the cult of the body
- Two millionaire internet business ideas “made in Japan”
- The advantages of starting your business in times of crisis
- How to start your business with no money
Featured image: 顔なし, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Flickr.
