
My billion dollar business idea - spydez
http://lbrandy.com/blog/2009/11/my-billion-dollar-business-idea/
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mixmax
I have a billion dollar idea: Start a grocery store. Seriously. When you have
enough money start another. Keep going until you have thousands. It can't
fail.

Another billion dollar idea: Start selling well designed Scandinavian
furniture really cheap. Build a few megastores around the world, and make sure
to squeeze your suppliers to keep prices down.

These two amazing ideas made Sam Walton and Ingvar Kamprad billionaires.
Execution you say? Nah, these ideas are so obviously amazing that they've
probably spent most of their time in business fending off blonde playmates
while drinking martinis at the beach.

~~~
RyanMcGreal
> Start a grocery store. Seriously.

WalMart's big innovation was to apply sophisticated, dynamic just-in-time
production methods to its product distribution system, cutting out both
inventory costs and out-of-stock sales losses. The efficiencies from JIT
logistics allowed the company to grow big enough that it could dictate prices
to suppliers, driving competitors out of business and further locking in its
monopoly in discount retail.

~~~
tptacek
Walmart has been a huge company since, I don't know, I did a report on their
stock in grammar school in the '80s. Is it really the case that
sophisticated/JIT/dynamic/etc has always been their key differentiator?

 _Not arguing_ , just asking.

~~~
RyanMcGreal
> As the chain began to take off, [Sam] Walton made major adjustments to
> manage the growth - again always seeming to see ahead. As early as 1966,
> when he had 20 stores, he attended an IBM school in upstate New York. His
> goal: to hire the smartest guy in the class to come down to Bentonville,
> Ark., and computerize his operations. He realized that he could not grow at
> the pace he desired without computerizing merchandise controls.

[http://www.time.com/time/time100/builder/profile/walton2.htm...](http://www.time.com/time/time100/builder/profile/walton2.html)

~~~
tptacek
Neat! Here's a question. When Wal-mart started "computerizing", the technology
was in its infancy. The modern Walmart supply chain/fulfillment operation is
ultra complex, and every advance has to be retrofitted onto their existing
systems.

If you were Sam Walton today, starting afresh, do you think the technology
required to reach Walmart levels of efficiency would be nearly as complex as
what they have now? You get to design your whole operation around the
software, instead of the other way around, right?

~~~
RyanMcGreal
It's an intriguing question, encompassing complex issues around the linearity
of application development, the constraints of path dependency, and so on.
Frankly I don't know enough about the internal workings of WalMart's
operations to answer helpfully.

The question is: would they really start from scratch or would they try to
shoehorn their processes into some existing application that kinda, sorta does
what they need and then hack-and-patch the rest of the way?

~~~
tptacek
It's more like, if you were starting a retail business of any sort, are there
tech decisions you could make very early on to drastically reduce the eventual
cost of operating a nationwide chain?

~~~
RyanMcGreal
It's a tough call. You don't want to optimize too prematurely for scaling,
because the kind of system that would work effectively for a nationwide chain
would likely be a very poor fit for a single store or small regional chain. My
guess is that a more valuable trait would be an aggressive willingness for the
business to 'kill its darlings' and break from processes that can't scale,
rather than falling prey to the psychology of previous investment and chasing
its losses.

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jacquesm
Placebos are already routinely prescribed by doctors.

As usual with any good idea people have had it before you did.

~~~
ryandvm
Really? Not that I doubt the placebo effect, but in today's litigious climate,
I'd be very surprised if modern doctors were actually engaging in the
necessary equivocation to produce the placebo effect.

My take on modern medicine is that most doctors in the U.S. are pretty much
limited to cover-your-ass medicine. That is, ordering unnecessary tests and
writing unnecessary prescriptions.

~~~
jacquesm
Two things, one: the world is a lot larger than just the US.

Two: doctors aren't going to go out of their way to tell their patients they
just got some compressed sugar because that would take away the effect.

There is a class of patients that will run to the GP every chance they get and
they won't leave until the doctor 'has done something' which translates in to
'had prescribed them some medicine'.

In these cases doctors prescribe placebos without any qualms at all, and to
the happiness of both the patient (the placebo works!), insurance company
(they're cheap) and the GP (patient leaves them alone).

~~~
ced
There was a TED talk by an Indian neurologist who said that placebo works
_even if you don't believe in it_.

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ramanujan
The Placebo effect was debunked in the New England Journal of Medicine several
years ago.

When you do studies that track three groups -- treatment, placebo, and _no
intervention_ \-- the placebo resembles the no intervention group. People just
tend to get better when they get sick and that is conflated with a placebo
effect.

Google "placebo nejm" for details.

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pbhjpbhj
Surely not sugar pills, it's got to taste horrible, good medicines don't taste
nice! Perhaps sugar pills but coated with bitrex ...?

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Tichy
For me a business idea also encompasses the possible path to getting traction.
"If we had x and Walmart would sell it, we would make billions" does not count
- is has to include "Walmart will sell it because".

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zedwill
It is already done. It is called Homeopathy
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeopathy> ;-)

~~~
aaronblohowiak
he makes this joke in the article

~~~
igorhvr
It is not a joke. Homeopathy _is_ the billion-dollar business he is talking
about.

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ektimo
Obecalp ("placebo" backwards) will be available for purchase from
<http://inventedbyamother.com/>

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steve_mobs
Ikea is a great idea. Sell artistic looking pieces of furniture that cost crap
to produce.

why buy a frank wright designed chair for thousands of dollars when you can
buy a similar chair for a hundred and no one will even know.

