20 Million-Dollar Businesses You've Never Heard Of | Hacker News Reader

20 Million-Dollar Businesses You've Never Heard Of

forbes.com

112 pointsthankuz68 comments

1. Rent-A-Green Box Entrepreneur: Spencer Brown * Product/Service: Environmentally friendly moving supplies, delivery and pickup Start Date: 2005 Startup Costs: $7 million Revenue: $2.6 million in 2009

2. Mabel's Labels Entrepreneur: Julie Cole Product/Service: Personalized, permanent labels for kids' stuff Start Date: 2002 Startup Costs: About $10,000 Revenue: $4 million in 2009

3. Fatheadz Entrepreneur: Rico Elmore Product/Service: Sunglasses for large people Start Date: 2004 Start-up Costs: About $500,000 Revenue: Estimated $2 million in 2010

4. Stave Puzzles Entrepreneur: Steve Richardson Product/Service: Hand-made wooden jigsaw puzzles. Start Date: 1974 Startup Costs: About $5,000 Revenue: $2.5 million in 2009 Ranging in price from $125 to $5,000, these puzzles are made of cherry wood, covered with a dry-mounted image drawn by one of 100 licensed artists, and individually hand-cut into as many as 2,500 pieces. Bill Gates has one, and Barbara Bush gave another as a gift to Queen Elizabeth. "We try to make them hard to put together," said 71-year-old Richardson, who calls himself the company's chief tormentor.

5. Texas Driving Experience Entrepreneur: Dawn Stokes Product/Service: High-performance driving lessons and retreats Start Date: 2004 Startup Costs: About $500,000 Revenue: Estimated $1.8 million in 2010

6. Litecubes Entrepreneur: Carl VanderSchuit Product/Service: Fake ice cubes that glow Start Date: 2001 Startup Costs: About $100,000 Revenue: $1.3 million in 2009

7. Smarter Fuel Entrepreneur: Dave Dunham Product/Service: Biodiesel fuel from restaurant frying oil Start Date: 2004 Startup Costs: $50,000 Revenue: $3 million in 2009

8. Sky Zone Entrepreneur: Rick Platt Product/Service: Arenas covered with trampolines Start Date: 2009 Startup Costs: About $2 million Revenue: $3 million-plus in 2009

9. Sanidoor Entrepreneur: Gale Lemrand. Product/Service: Sanitary, touchless restroom-door openers Start Date: 2009. Startup Costs: About $3.5 million Revenue: Estimated $2.2 million in 2010

10. Geese Police Entrepreneur: Dave Marcks Product/Service: Geese abatement using collies Start Date: 1987 Startup Costs: About $3,000 Revenue: Estimated $2.5 million in 2010

11. Neuberg & Neuberg Entrepreneur: Larry Neuberg Product/Service: Importing gold for gilding Start Date: 1962 Startup Costs: Virtually none Revenue: Estimated $3 million in 2010

12. Deeplocal Entrepreneur: Nathan Martin Product/Service: Promotions mixing the digital and physical Start Date: 2006 Startup Costs: Financed out of initial $30,000 contract Revenue: Estimated $1 million-plus in 2010

13. BlackSocks Entrepreneur: Samuel Liechti Product/Service: Sock subscriptions Start Date: 1999 Startup Costs: $30,000 Revenue: $5 million in 2009

14. DNA 11 Entrepreneurs: Adrian Salamunovic and Nazim Ahmed Product/Service: DNA artwork Start Date: 2005 Start-up Costs: $2,000 Revenue: $1.4 million in 2009

15. The Fiero Store Entrepreneur: Matthew Hartzog. Product/Service: Parts and accessories for the Pontiac Fiero Start Date: 1991 Start-up Costs: $5,000 Revenue: $2 million in 2009

16. Heritage Link Brands Entrepreneurs: Selena Cuffe and Khary Cuffe Product/Service: African wine Start Date: 2005 Start-up Costs: $75,000 Revenue: $1 million in 2009

17. Jimmy Beans Wool Entrepreneur: Laura Zander Product/Service: Knitting and crochet supplies Start Date: 2002 Startup Costs: $30,000 Revenue: $2.8 million in 2009

18. PetRelocation.com Entrepreneur: Kevin O'Brien and Angie O'Brien Product/Service: Pet travel Start Date: 2004 Start-up Costs: $97,000 Revenue: Estimated $4 million in 2010

19. Murray Associates Entrepreneur: Kevin D. Murray Product/Service: Eavesdropping detection and counterespionage Start Date: 1978 Startup Costs: $5,000 Revenue in 2009: $760,000

thank you so much. I was interested in the article, but couldn't continue reading past the labels. I'm surprised that forbes.com (ostensibly a reputable magazine) has gone with a "2leep" style layout.

Adsense "clickbombs" everywhere and completely unreadable.

This is 'content farm' quality at best, which is a shame because it seems an interesting article.

I'm sorry you feel that way. As a Forbes developer, I can tell you we are trying to make the site as usable as possible. If you have any specific feedback I can pass along drop me an email at buley.reports at gmail

Summarize in as few as pages possible - the less clicks needed the better. Not sure how well that works with the management since they are probably interested more in pageviews than anything else, but it would be a start. Second, the information in this "article" was factual, not pictorial, so why was it in a slideshow? The pictures are second to the numbers - they certainly aid in telling the story, but they aren't THE story.

EVERYONE feels that way. I don't bother sending around Forbes links anymore because they require so many clicks. One piece of advice - make a printable page that way we don't have to click so many times

I certainly agree. The real problem is what mandatory interstitials (not in this case, I see), AdSense boxes next to content and tiny amounts of content per page do to a site. They exude an aura closer to desperation than success. I'm guessing Forbes readers can pick up on that better than most.

I know internet publishing is a tough business, but we all know there's a problem here.

You have a whole heap of space, why would you overlay the text over the image, it also feels like their is more advertising space than content space.

An ideal layout would be all one page, it would have the text nicely under or around the images. Even if the ad in the top and side bars was still there at least they wouldn't seem like the most prominent thing on the page.

The NYTimes does all this quiet well, they page but at least their pages are quiet long. They may even have the same amount of ads on the page but the content is so much more dense that it doesn't feel spammy.

We've still got plenty of room for improvement, clearly, but the editorial team just recently introduced a new version of the gallery slides that get us a bit closer to what you're describing: http://blogs.forbes.com/bruceupbin/2010/12/08/spacex-gets-ku...

I think the "all one page" idea is a good one, and I'll talk to the right folks about it. My only concern is that such a media-heavy page is going to be pretty rough in terms of page speed.

Yes, that's a gallery where the text is not overlaid on the photo, and the Google ads are not quite as tacky, but I think this is missing the point: the content in the OP doesn't belong in a photo gallery format at all.

Notice how many points the posts summarizing the article received - NOBODY to whom you actually want to advertise has any desire to sit around clicking through a gallery to read text.

Yes, your single page load speed may be good, but imagine how much slower your total gallery experience is. You can always have a load more content on scroll if it's really a problem.

To add to this, consider how the Big Picture does it, probably "suited" to a gallery but it's all in one big page.

I don't care so much about the all in one page, but having to roll over the image to see the text was too difficult. Took me a minute just to figure it out. Have the text below the image without having to roll over it. I also had trouble figuring out at the opening shot where to click. Took me forever to find the next button, I found it just in time. I almost left!

Check out the design books: The Design of Every Day things Designing the Obvious Information Dashboard Design

for a primer on UI design.

Hear, hear. Too many graphic designers know nothing about UI design.

Oh wow, I didn't even notice that there was an 'article' behind it. All I saw was a single image and didn't notice the 'next' button and originally thought the posters above put up more examples of these sort of businesses

>Biodiesel fuel from restaurant frying oil

My sister-in-law sells restaurant equipment. One of her products is a catalyst (some sort of metal mesh, I think) that you put in the fryer to keep the oil fresh--makes it last 3 times as long, I think. That sort of thing will make it harder to find oil for biodiesel.

These are what I call real startups. Many of them are imaginative and solve real customer needs. I hope that many of them can grow into thriving businesses.

One point that I think is interesting is that even though they're all "offline" businesses, most were started with very little capital investment.

I sometimes get the feeling that the HN crowd is a bit (understandably) myopic and focuses too much on simplistic websites. But I believe that more articles like this, which showcase business ideas in other fields, could be very valuable in inspiring people and getting the creative juices flowing.

There's a much bigger world out there than one might imagine!

the HN crowd is a bit myopic and focuses way too much on simplistic websites.

Perhaps. But we focus on websites because those are what we know. This is a web-based community of web-based hackers. We've got that in common.

Presumably the communities of "breeders of goose-chasing dogs" spend a certain amount of time discussing the realities of the goose-chasing dog business. I know for a fact that communities of chicken breeders know something about the free-range egg business, and that if you hang around with enough folk musicians you will eventually learn something about the folk-musician business.

> I sometimes get the feeling that the HN crowd is a bit (understandably) myopic and focuses too much on simplistic websites.

i disagree with the simplistic notion. but i'd note that it focuses on software because that is YC's wheelhouse. this is a niche website, for sure. you will certainly find other somewhat similar sites more oriented towards various other things.

What is with the ridiculous use of "In Pictures" features now days?

If they want the page views, put each company on a seperate page, but don't pretend that the pictures count for more than 1% of the interesting aspect of this feature, and don't use a terrible slideshow system that makes it actually annoying to read the text.

It racks up page views and saves them from actually writing any compelling content. And it also means they're driving people away from their site as fast as possible.

It allows graphic designers to become content providers! Also probably has to do w/ the popularity of infographics, photo sharing, etc. The worst part IMO is, most people just 'create' their images in a graphics program w/o giving further thought to sharing, embedding, tracking, usability, etc. And, then post it to their site w/o alt tags or a descriptive URL path.

A great bunch of ideas but hopeless presentation. Why the heck does Forbes use this slideshow style of presenting ?

Loved the rent-a-green box idea and also the socks subscription :). Who could've thought about socks and underwear subscription, really :). Thanks for posting.

> "Why the heck does Forbes use this slideshow style of presenting ?"

To artificially inflate page views and advertising impressions.

The socks idea is interesting, but the blurb says the company estimates it will save the average customer 12 hours a year buying socks. Really? 12 hours per year?

Where's the justification for most of these businesses actually being worth 20 million dollars? I mean they're awesome stories, but when you have $1-2 million in revenue and have to deal with physical products, you won't exactly have millions in profits. So if you're generating, say, $200K in profits, who exactly is going to give you a 100 P/E and pay you $20 million for that business?

Why does Forbes need to go the bullshit "How This Kid Made $60M" route to rouse interest? Can't it be awesome enough in itself that someone is making a very fine living selling labels or socks? Oh no, unless they're worth eight digits, they're not worth talking about. Sad.

I read it as "here are 20 different one million dollar businesses" which seems more in line with the numbers presented.

Ha. That would make sense. And this would qualify as a terrible fucking headline as it can be read as (20 million-dollar) businesses, (20) million-dollar businesses, and (20 million) dollar businesses.

Forbes is terrible.

Another good presentation like this was done by AdaFruit, the open source hardware company. The founder and an editor at Make: pinged 13 OSH vendors and found in aggregate they were doing $50MM a year in revenue. I'm fairly impressed by it considering they are mostly 1-3 person operations.

http://www.adafruit.com/blog/2010/05/03/million-dollar-baby-...

revenue != profit.

take the Fiero guy...sure 2 mil is impressive...but car parts are expensive...and his profit margin is most likely only 7%(seems to be the average for car parts)...which turns his 2 mil into $140K.

Prior to quitting my day job, I was propositioned by an Englishman living in my town to improve his website, which he had hand-coded in PHP. There are several million owners of vintage Japanese cars in the world, there are several thousand places locally you can find a carburetor for a '82 Camry (I have no clue if that actually makes sense -- work with me here), and there is precisely one man in town who can match up "Customer in England with '82 Camry" and "72 year old owner of used auto store in central Japan."

Which is a long way of saying that I have exactly one data point for the profit margin of a particular niche auto parts business. Suffice it to say that -- after you deduct shipping, duties, and cost of goods -- it is still higher than mine, and all I do for order fulfillment is a SQL call. (Quote: "If they don't like my prices, then they can either learn to speak Japanese or sod off.")

yes when you have a monopoly you can charge anything you want and people will pay it.

The Fiero example is different, since it's an "iconic" car, which means there are plenty of aftermarket suppliers/vendors who sell this stuff(usually other enthusiasts), so he can't really gouge.

Plus, since its a GM product from the 80s/90s..everything is interchangeable...which means he can't really charge a premium for Fiero stuff, since those exact parts can be found in any number of other Chevy, Pontiac products.

For example the 4 cylinder that came in the Fiero, also came in Chevy Astro, Camaro, Citation, Lumina, S10 and Pontiac 6000, Phoenix, Celebrity, Grand Am, Firebird, as well as Buick Century, Somerset, Skylark and Oldsmobile Cutlass and Omega.

Great story Patrick. I think a lot of people equate physical products with low margins, but often that is not the case. Music and media focused startups are a great example of this. After license payments the profits of even a successful company like Pandora are tiny. Compared to a number of physical products/ecommerce companies where margins can be 30-50%.

Agree that profit margins can be very thin, but in this case the Fiero guy is probably doing pretty well.

If the Fiero parts guy is primarily selling to end users (which it looks like he does), his profit is probably closer to 33% per item. Standard markup for auto parts to private customer is 1.5x

Source: Family run auto repair shop for 20+ years.

Nice list, hated they way they were shown.

They just got 20 times the amount of page views though. If they provided a list that means you could have skipped through and decreased their page views.

Really? I stopped at the second one and decided to read this thread instead (where the currently top voted comment is a pertinent summary)

That's still twice the page views that they would have received if it was all on one page.

But way less user engagement / time on site / likelihood of me coming back

A data point to back this up: after reading high quality articles presented in a good fashion I have actually typed in and gone to http://www.theatlantic.com/. This was a good article presented as if it was on aol.

I wish people would stop worrying about page views, its a broken metric, always has been.

It's not a broken metric when you're selling ad impressions on each page view. It's how you make money.

i understand that's how ads are sold, but it does doesn't work.

the numbers are inaccurate, varying wildly depending on how you measure it (web server logs, analytics, etc), and its a horrible way for advertiser to measure ROI.

i don't think it's horrible, it's just not the only way.

"display advertising" isn't going away. just because someone doesn't click on something (or otherwise 'engage') at the moment of viewing doesn't mean that it was wasted. People remember stuff, and often won't act until they see something 8-10 times.

Just because there are other ways of measuring doesn't mean that using 'impressions' to gauge ROI is 'horrible'.

I love the green boxes. Last time I moved my roommate spent almost $50 on cardboard boxes. After unpacking we immediately threw them away (with the additional hassel of disassembling them). This is a far better solution.

I hope they become available in my state next time I have to move.

It would also compel you to unload quickly. I've been in my house for 8.5 years, and I've still got boxes in the garage.

I think the idea is great also. http://frogbox.com/ is a company started here in Vancouver who does the same thing. they also have started franchising it. I have never used them but had a friend looked into using them and said it was too expensive compared to regular boxes. It looks like it cost about $110 for boxes for a two bedroom rental. Guess the convenience and green benefits are the selling factors.

As any great entrepreneur or hacker or opportunist would say... Who wants to copy one with me?

Up votes but no replies to actually take do it. I am no where near the ability of most of you on the coding side but can take care of any other aspect of the business.

Design of article widget makes me want to fail.

Also, not many of these are high margin businesses. Meh, you have a $2mm revenue shipping business with 10% margins and 10 employees that takes all your time to run. I would rather own a $100k/year web service.

I must be really sleepy. I clicked on the article thinking ... 20 million "dollar businesses" ... wtf? Parse Error. Need more caffeine.

LOL

Join the club. I read it as "$20 million dollar businesses" ...

I feel I must apologize for not pointing out the UI issues on the page right after I posted the piece - I should know better. I almost didn't submit it, but couldn't find an alternative on any blogs. Thanks to DevX101 for taking the time to post the "meat-n-potatoes" of the story! Thanks to everyone for chiming in w/ your opinions.

Thought it was pretty good rep management for the Forbes dev to stop by and leave an address for feedback - props to taylorbuley for that!

Another one not listed: Cheeseheads (from old sofa cushions)

http://www.smartbrief.com/news/entrepreneurs/storyDetails.js...

However we are here aiming for billions, Sir.

Sock subscriptions - what an awesome idea!

There is another startup like that in Boston called "ManPacks". A subscription service for socks, tshirts, etc. I thought it was a kind of dumb idea, but if that sock revenue number is real they are onto something big!

http://www.manpacks.com/

Subscription services for regular, physical goods are a blessing. They may seem gimmicky and lazy at first, but once you realize the benefit of delegating and automating a part of your life, you'll jump right on it.

Of course, it takes the customers to realize that they do in fact tend to run out of boxers, socks and other supplies regularly, but people in their twenties should already have had that epiphany.

In my country, there's currently an online (e-)grocer where I can buy a week's worth of groceries (with no risk of buying snacks when I shop with the munchies!) and use that half-to-one-hour time for each trip on something else.

They even accept return deposit bottles so I don't have to go down to the grocer and redeem them.

What's gimmicky laziness to one is optimization, delegation and automation to someone else. :)

Agreed. I wonder what percentage of us have promptly thought about the startup costs and practicalities for doing that sort of business ourselves ;-)

A subscription service for men's clothing is an excellent idea! There is so much not to like about the current experience of shopping for clothes now.

If you don't mind me being a bit of a contrarian, I notice that apart from the green boxes and the biofuel ones, none of these companies seem to be "saving customers money". And many are selling straight novelty items (puzzles, racing car school... glowing icecubes?) Am I missing anything here?

Last one is impressive. At $7000 a day the guy only has to work 143 days to reach a million per year.

I've met people who are kept very busy at a somewhat higher daily rate - nothing to do with technology though. They do have to dress very oddly.

It's worth checking out Nathan Martin's talk given at TEDxPSU in 2010 (CEO of Deeplocal, #12).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ju9ZJSSP2h8

springwise.com is a good site for seeing interesting businesses; check it out

I interviewed Spencer Brown of Rent-A-Green-Box almost two years ago via phone. He is a really cool guy and was happy to talk to a student for about half an hour. His strategy for marketing was mostly what he calls the Gorp cloud - the interconnected world of green media which can mention him to all prospective customers. He spent a fortune on R&D in the beginning (http://changingclothing.recojeans.com/introduction-2/) but was profitable cashflow wise in the first week.

Fatheadz - awesome idea. I probably couldn't be described as 'big' or 'fat', but my head is wider than normal, which means 90% of sunglasses look absolutely ridiculous on me. I can only wear 150mm+ lenses, such as 'large' Ray-ban Aviators, which are 150mm exactly hinge to hinge (I've measured).

Fatheadz is one of the only sunglass websites that explicitly states the width, in mm, of their frames.

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