3. Inventor
Did you watch the 2015 biopic Joy with Jennifer Lawrence and Robert De Niro, about self-made millionaire Joy Mangano? If you did, you will know that she created a product called The Miracle Mop, a self-wringing mop, and ultimately an empire. She started out by making 100 mops with only a small amount of money she had saved.
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Of course, the Internet has also made it possible to bring ideas and money together much faster. Putting your idea on Kickstarter or Indiegogo, for example, could allow you to raise a lot of money with people who genuinely want to see your product to life. Zach Braff even brought his 2014 film, Wish I Was Here, to life via Kickstarter.
A lot of regular people have even managed to raise over a million dollars. One of the most successful projects was Pebble Time, a watch, which raised 1 million dollars in 1 hour and 10 million dollars in less than a month. Time to put your thinking cap on.
2. App Designer
Remember Flappy Bird (2014)? That game that once you got the hang of it, was as addictive as pizza, chocolate and potato chips? And to think that it took the creator, Dong Nguyen, all of three days to make it. Three days?! This has got to be the fastest path to millionaire dot com – indeed, no other person has gotten rich so quickly, and that includes Mark Zuckerberg.
Nguyen was thinking he would make a few couple of hundred dollars a month. Little did he know the video would go viral and end up being at the top of the App Store and Google Playlist. He was making $50,000 a day before he took the app down because it got to be too much for him.
Why was this particular game so successful? According to the Nguyen, it was because “[I]t happens to be something different from mobile games today, and is a really good game to compete against each other… People in the same classroom can play and compete easily because [Flappy Bird] is simple to learn, but you need skill to get a high score.” In some ways, this is a success story, at least monetarily. However, Nguyen lamented over the fact that he had lost his simple life.
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