The power of stupid stuff

Doing stupid stuff can pay off.

Years ago Jamie (who was a big name in the tech that I worked with) started a new agency. He joined us for a meet-up (remember the days of being in the same room with strangers?) and told us about his new venture that he was launching with a guy I didn’t know called Zach - “Made in London”. Except every single one of us immediately asked him “Maid? Like a cleaning service?” This annoyed Jamie a lot.

The next day, too hungover to do any real work, I photoshopped Jamie’s face onto a photo of a French maid and set up a site called “maidinlondon.com”. I included a link to the real site, showed it to my friends and we all had a good laugh.

A few weeks later Zach posts a link to my site on Twitter, asking who made it. I hold my hands up, he says he found it because he saw it in his analytics and he thought it was funny.

A couple of months after that, Zach posts that he has a client but he’s too busy to do the work so is anyone available. I reply again, Zach chooses me over the other replies, does the introduction and I land myself a six month contract.

All because I photoshopped Jamie’s head onto a french maid and bought a joke domain name when hung over.

So what stupid stuff have you done that’s actually been a genius business idea?