What about a unassembled snowman that also needed to be frozen before use?

Sometimes finding a business to start requires that you turn conventional wisdom on it’s head.

From Business Opportunities Weblog.

Business Week on the creation of IdeaPaint:

Sometimes a product idea is as obvious as the wall right in front of you. In 2005, three Babson College undergrads were brainstorming on a whiteboard, but had to keep erasing proposals to make room for more. Then, recalls Jeff Avalon, one of them said, “Wouldn’t it be great if we could have a dry erase board that just took up the entire wall?” Over the next three years, Avalon, John Goscha, and Morgan Newman collaborated with chemists to come up with a durable, smooth, and nonabsorbing paint that could turn a flat surface into an erasable board.

From Business Opportunities Weblog.

Ballard News Tribune:

While most people see only bland depictions of mountains or umbrellas when perusing the seemingly endless varieties of bottled waters on grocery store racks, Ballard resident Marie Nicholas saw something else: Opportunity.

With Nicholas’ Model on a Bottle, instead of a mountain, thirsty customers get musclebound and shirtless “Pro Fitness Model Hitch.” Instead of an umbrella, “Model Jayla Murray” in a black bikini stares out from the bottle.

The new business, owned and operated by Nicholas, has replaced company logos with labels full of scantily-clad models, musicians, athletes and potential celebrities – all unheard-of, but hungry for publicity.

From Business Opportunities Weblog.

WBAY TV:

Filar developed a specialized digital eye camera that attaches to a scope doctors use to look into a patient’s eyes. It plugs into a computer and takes pictures or video, “and I can actually see the inside of the eye here.”

Filar says he had the idea for a portable device like this in his head for years, thinking it would be great for use in remote areas by the military, mission workers, even himself during visits to nursing homes.

Filar finally got serious about it last January. By April he had a working model ready to market.

But he never dreamt of receiving a call like the one earlier this month.

It was NASA on the phone and in less than 21 months, an invention by Wisconsin optometrist has gone from an idea in his head to being used by NASA on the space station.

From Business Opportunities Weblog.

NY Times:

Among the traditional brick and clapboard structures that line the streets of this sleepy East Texas town, 70 miles north of Houston, a few houses stand out: their roofs are made of license plates, and their windows of crystal platters.

They are the creations of Dan Phillips, 64, who has had an astonishingly varied life, working as an intelligence officer in the Army, a college dance instructor, an antiques dealer and a syndicated cryptogram puzzle maker. About 12 years ago, Mr. Phillips began his latest career: building low-income housing out of trash.

In 1997 Mr. Phillips mortgaged his house to start his construction company, Phoenix Commotion. “Look at kids playing with blocks,” he said. “I think it’s in everyone’s DNA to want to be a builder.” Moreover, he said, he was disturbed by the irony of landfills choked with building materials and yet a lack of affordable housing.

From Business Opportunities Weblog.

photo credit: AMagill

Billionaire Mark Cuban has written a very information post explaining how not to ask for money in email:

The first thing I do at this point is look at the senders email address. Is it an email with the company name in the URL ? If it isnt.. ding, ding, ding. They sender has come up with a name, but doesn’t have the focus or confidence to put up a website. This person was using a gmail account. Next my #FailDar was ringing louder than Larry Kudlow talking nonsense on CNBC about green shoots when I read the “designed for different industries and is dedicated to improve the quality of life of individuals throughout the world, one step at a time” Im sorry, but could anyone possibly invent and write anything that is more full of shit than this person ? That has to go down in business letter history as one of the all time worse lines. If you want to get someone interested in your company, DO NOT tell them you are going to save the world. You are not. No one will believe you will. Save that nonsense for your grandma when you are trying to make her proud of you.

From Business Opportunities Weblog.

LA Times:

As far as the Rev. Darrell Best knows, he has the fastest church in Illinois.

His 1942 firetruck is by no means a Ferrari, but it is equipped as a fully functioning chapel.

“I’ve had it up to 55 mph,” Best said. “It gets a lot of attention on the highway.”

Mechanics from the Country Music Television show “Trick My Truck” did the conversion after Best’s family wrote to the program last year. The chapel has stained-glass windows, a pipe organ, an altar and two wooden pews.

More photos of Rev. Best’s chapel are also available.

From Business Opportunities Weblog.

Business Week:

On a visit to Portland, Ore., about three years ago, Bill Leikam watched curiously as his brother used an odd piece of plywood to pull a hot rack from of the oven. “I said: ‘What was that?’” recalls Leikam. It was the family’s “oven buddy” he was told.

Like every inventor, Leikam believed that he could design a much better version. For about six months, the retired chief of a Silicon Valley high-tech firm ruminated on the idea and then headed to a local lumberyard to try his hand as a toolmaker. After devising five different iterations and plowing $12,000 of his own savings into the new venture, Leikam launched the Oven Claw in Palo Alto, Calif. Last Christmas he began selling the hardwood utensil online and at seven specialty stores.

From Business Opportunities Weblog.

When you play golf, do you carry your own clubs or pay a caddy to do it for you? One golf course in Cedar Mountain, North Carolina has decided to differentiate itself from the other local course by offering a unique variety of caddy: llamas!

Llamas are available every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday from 9am to 11am at our Golf Course. Come on out and play a round, or just come by to see the friendly, four legged helpers!

From Business Opportunities Weblog.

ShoeMoney:

Huber Chevrolet told me about how they had a separate sales division that did nothing but answer phone calls and emails from internet leads and they valued each of those at XX (they asked me not to reveal the specifics).
I told them I would charge them $10 per internet lead (a small fraction of what they are currently paying) but with the condition I could publish a lot of the data on my case study (what your reading). I also told them I wanted to exclusively use MySpace for this test because in past ones we mainly focused on Facebook for driving social network traffic. I really like the super advanced targeting features of MySpace MyAds. They allowed us to target not only cities but specific zip codes. In addition to the geographic targeting we could also target people who were interested in cars or whatever else we thought would convert well.

They were pretty excited to get started. That night I registered hubercash4clunkers.info and had our designer make 4-5 different versions of the landing page rotating through Google’s Website Optimizer to see which one converted the best. Here was the winner converting at 74% (not to bad):

From Business Opportunities Weblog.