Chances are that you’ve come up with a million dollar idea but someone else beat you to the punch. Maybe you lacked the capital or missed the opportunity to bring the idea to life. Most likely it’s because you lacked confidence in yourself or faith in your idea. In these type of cases, I’ve found that the most persistent people become successful instead of the smartest or richest. Definitely take the time to develop your self-confidence and a good place to start is learning about yourself. I took this assessment that classified your role in a team environment typically found in a work project setting. It was called the Team Dimensions Profile and it’s presently getting phased out but you can find the more recent assessments at discprofile.com for a small fee. What’s great is that the report you receive provides you a conceptual framework of what roles are required to make an idea become reality. What I’ve discovered is that these profiles are marketed toward traditional business models with an employee mindset. The secret sauce is in the essential elements of the report because what it’s really discussing is the hidden requirements of an entrepreneur. Although the report is about working in teams, when you are launching an idea there’s a good chance you will have to play all roles at some point in the process. This gives you a good idea of what your strengths and weaknesses are so you can take measures to compensate or work with people that complement your strengths. The gist of my report stated that I was a creator and that means I simply come up with ideas. Not all of them are good mind you, but it’s true that ideas come very naturally to me. I find abstract ideas very intellectually stimulating if I can find someone with the same wavelength. In that respect, I’d like to share some of the ideas I’ve come up with that are relatively unique because it’s based on my personal observation and living my life. I’d love to have the time and capital to pursue all of them but I can only focus on one at this point in my journey. That being said, I hope some of these ideas can make you rich someday. If you do, feel free to send some love back to help promote this blog. What goes around comes around. Here are my 3 unique ideas to make a million dollars.
1. Riceballs Are The Next Big Dessert
These glutinous riceballs have the perfect texture to accommodate a variety of sweet treats limited only by the imagination. The dessert is traditionally a Chinese dessert served hot during the winter solstice festivals in a sweet warm syrup. Alone, they are quite bland but the magic about these delectable little treats is when you combine them with an ice slush that has condensed milk and brown sugar. There is some magical balance that can be achieved that offers a very pleasing oral sensation and hits all the right dopamine buttons. The unfair advantage behind this idea is that the process to make them is quite labor intensive. So why don’t you make a show of it? Big glass partitions looking into the kitchen process as people come far and wide to be fascinated with the steps, greatly increasing their interest and curiosity. There is a novel premium that you can charge for this type of showmanship and an unsaid appreciation for things made fresh. There is a perfection waiting to be discovered in the balance of the flours used, how chewy they should be, and what is the perfect size riceball that can collectively create a brand. I envision this to be a very profitable niche if you can produce a perfect riceball that no other competitor can imitate. By combining showmanship with the freshest riceballs in town, you can dominate this market and create a franchise. By focusing on a single item, you can definitely make it yours and give people an attention to detail they’ve never experienced in this dessert. You can make it hot or cold so it’s profitable year round. You can make seasonal specialties or combine complementing menu items like fresh teas. There are plenty of teashops that offer riceballs with their ice slush, but they often have a surcharge and none of them have made a proper marketing effort because the workers don’t like making them. A lot of the existing boba teashops are generally copycats that jumped on the boba popularity train and are not innovators in the industry. This makes them less of a competition while you create a league of your own. You need a special touch to bring this idea to life and it’s perfect for someone looking for the next big dessert idea. It’s relatively low risk to start and can even start making at them at home to see what people think.
2. Helium Network and Emergency Response
This one’s for the tech-savvy people. There’s a hidden network popping up in a major city near you called the Helium Network. This is a new business model of normal people buying radio equipment that looks like a small router and installing them in their homes to help expand Helium’s radio network. What does it do? Nobody really cares because the promise is that by setting one up, you can receive payment in cryptocurrency in the form of the Helium token. You can sell these tokens on an exchange like Binance.US (My #1 recommended exchange for US citizens) and get real USD for it. The craze is to buy as many of these radio cryptocurrency helium miners as you can, set them up and get passive income. I’ve fallen into this trap as well and my profits are dwindling exponentially. When I started using my brain, I saw that the real money is in trying to figure out how to use or leverage the Helium network instead of trying to expand it. The market is fairly saturated at this point and there are far more helium hotspots than ways to use the network. There are small niches that are using it like e-scooter companies looking for where their scooters were left after the battery dies so they can locate them. As far as I can tell, the majority of use cases suck. The majority of manufactures that build products that leverage the Helium Network specialize in things like measuring weather and other scientific crap. Who cares? Anyway, this idea really stems from personal experience working as a Mobile Intensive Care Nurse in Los Angeles County. Sometimes people die because we couldn’t find where they were or we got to them too late. When I’m at music festivals, how can the emergency team locate a single person in a massive sea of people? I believe that you can use the Helium network’s radio technology to triangulate a position. If applied correctly, it will be significantly more accurate than GPS because you can finally solve the problem of tracking a position’s altitude as well. How does triangulation work? If I can send an SOS signal preferably from a Helium iot-enabled device, like a button on a wristband, it will send a radio signal out to the closest radio hotspots. If you can time the length of time it takes for the signal to be received, you can use a formula or algorithm to pinpoint exactly where the signal came from. This would be an easy task for some technology university grad students to develop and I’m willing to bet it already has. The greater number of hotspots that report data, the more accurate the positioning. What this does is help save lives by decreasing the time it takes to find someone that needs help. Imagine EMS using an app that uses a Pokemon style augmented reality on their phone’s camera to locate a signal’s source. You could potentially have invented a market disrupting safety product for large events. It could be expanded upon for security as well if someone’s in trouble. Or you can use it as a VIP concierge type of service where a client can be found anywhere at anytime. Pitch this to Pasquale Rotella, the experience creator of EDC and other music festivals, and I’m confident you can prevent young people from dying at his festivals. There’s a lot of money there and I believe the intention is noble. I thought this would be a fun project to work on because I’m a bit nerdy myself but life never dealt me that hand and I haven’t had the fortune of meeting bright young minds that understand these engineering and programming principles in depth. Perhaps this idea can be your hand.
3. Riding The Bitcoin Boom
Do you remember the real estate boom? I remember so many people got rich and they still talk about it today. People always wish they can go back in time and invest before the run up, sell the top of the market, or bought after the crash. The key lesson here is timing. Bitcoin is $39,361.37 at the time of this writing. It may not be $1,000 a coin but it’s still early and there is an opportunity here that is unlike anything humanity has ever seen. If you’re thinking about small things like retirement, portfolios, finances, and vacations then you’re thinking too small. What I’m talking about is the single greatest redistribution of wealth in the history of the world. The freedom to purchase a piece of property that will create the founding architecture of the coming virtual world. This is kind of like buying continents before countries or cities were made. Imagine owning California in the virtual sense. This is what companies like Google, Microsoft, and Apple have done with their proprietary technology but there is going to be a need for a universal currency that will be the basis for every transaction done in the virtual space. That currency is 100% bitcoin. The key here is that big tech companies like Tesla also have to play by the same rules as everyone else and buy it on an exchange. A common strategy used by real estate investors is to take out a home equity loan on a property and use that money as a down payment toward another property. This way you can use debt to own several properties at once and using that leverage to continuously leap frog your real estate portfolio into a small empire. The strategy is sound if you expect values of the properties to continue to go up. This is a relatively slow process and it takes time to build equity, cash flow, and sell properties if needed. In a crash, you’ll be stuck with a lot of properties and a lot of debt. This is where bitcoin is so unique. It’s an instantly liquid asset that you can borrow against much like a home equity loan. Then you can use that loan to buy more bitcoin. The easiest place to buy bitcoin is on Coinbase. The cheapest place to buy bitcoin is on Binance.US Then when the value goes up, you can borrow against the increased value. The best place to borrow against bitcoin is on Celsius. You can also wait for the value to come down to buy more. You can buy as little as $10 of bitcoin or $1,000,000 of bitcoin since the property is infinitely divisible making it very different from a real estate property. You can start with any amount which is different from how much you need to buy your first home. The secret here is to accumulate as much bitcoin as you can. By utilizing the same strategy as real estate investors, you can amass significantly more bitcoin than you could on your own money. When the timing is right and the market top is near, you should sell your cost basis, or the amount of dollars you put in. Then borrow against the rest of your bitcoin’s value. This should leave you a nice lump sum to have to prepare for any opportunities that present itself and leave you paying 0 taxes at the end of this transaction. You can use that cash to buy a crashing stock or real estate market. Then you can sit back and ride through that depression with a bunch of other people’s stuff you bought for dirt cheap. You could be the next Warren Buffet. I am currently considering buying some boring baby boomer businesses with that money to really get that cash flow going. Once cash flow is in you can quit your day job and focus on more creative ways to help people or improve upon what you already have. Mahalo.