Crazy Business Ideas And Why They Make Sense
Today, I’m going to be writing about heavy metal dinosaurs.
You aren’t going mad. Those are heavy metal dinosaurs. It’s a band called Hevisaurus. They come from Finland, where heavy metal is incredibly popular.
You might think that a band full of people dressed up as dinosaurs from a parallel dimension is stupid.
You’d be wrong.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hevisaurus
Multiple albums, singles, apps and a theme park from that single ridiculous idea. That’s not to mention the merchandise and other stuff that’s impossible to track or the future potential.
You only need to look at the recent Ghostbusters debacle to see how much people get into this sort of stuff.
Let’s Take A Step Back (Or Away from the Heavy Metal Dinosaurs)
YouTube has demonstrated that whatever it is you’re good at, there are a million other people who are probably better.
Using the internet, you can connect to talented people from all over the world.
To fast-forward this subject a little, in business terms this means that there’s massive competition for just about everything. It’s one of the major questions new and would-be entrepreneurs always have; “What about the fact that there are a million businesses doing exactly what I want to do?”
It’s also what leads to business professors and other mentors endlessly talking about “USPs” and “Competitive Advantages.”
What’s that got to do with heavy metal dinosaurs?
In a past life, I wrote music professionally. I know a whole load of musicians, amateur and professional, self-taught and classically trained over years of lessons with pretentious tutors.
That’s all a story for another day, but there’s one thing I can tell you: Nearly all of them would have been better off if they’d stopped practising their instruments, gone to a fancy dress store and became a heavy metal dinosaur.
In fact, coupled with a bit of business sense, a gimmick like heavy metal dinosaurs could be worth an absolute fortune. I should have thought of it.
Most musicians would never think of this, and would probably turn their nose up at the idea of using a gimmick. But compare multiple charting albums and other money-making ventures with that guy who spends eight hours a day practising his guitar only to upload the odd video to YouTube of his virtuoso soloing, only to get 50 views and absolutely no money.
It’s the same as writers who point-blank refuse to study copywriting or genre fiction because they’re hoping one day an agent will actually read their fictionalised autobiography about contemporary attitudes towards the wage gap.
Crazy Business Ideas Are Not As Crazy As You Think
Let’s work out why Hevisaurus was always going to be a success, because it’s important.
A lot of people are going to watch the video above (at least the ones I haven’t lost already) and think, “Yeah, but that’s a crazy business idea and there’s no way to replicate that success or know if it was going to be successful in the first place!”
However, let’s look at my oft-repeated keys to building a small business:
- Find a problem that people want solved.
- Create a solution to a high standard.
- Get all the other particulars right. Be on time, don’t be a dick, etc.
That’s really all there is to it.
I’ve bolded the first point, because that’s where we can involve the heavy metal dinosaurs.
Heavy metal is a saturated industry. In fact, music is regarded as one of the impossible industries to break into because everyone wants to be a rock star. So, you might think that there are no options available to you as a heavy metal musician.
Someone else did something really simple though: They looked to a different market.
Heavy metal is not for children.
It’s anti-authoritarian. It’s rebellious. It’s a bit weird in general. The fashion sense of the average heavy metal listener is not something you’d want to encourage your kids to adopt.
That’s ok, because the average heavy metal band doesn’t write music for children. They go for the angry adolescents and angry-yet-slightly-more-reserved-adults.
Every heavy metal band basically follows the same formula and gets the same marketing by the record execs. They play the same venues. Their album artwork looks the same.
If you start a heavy metal band, there’s massive competition.
Our dinosaur band has no competition. No heavy metal band writes for children. No heavy metal band plays gigs for children. No heavy metal band targets their marketing or merchandise to children.
So Hevisaurus have a clean sweep. There are some problems and some advantages that we can learn from them.
Crazy Business Ideas: The Problems and Advantages
Firstly, if you’re going to enter a saturated market, you’re going to need to differentiate yourself massively from current offerings.
Bloggers could do with heeding this lesson.
Hevisaurus is absolutely nothing like a traditional heavy metal band. If they’d ditched the costumes and been a serious heavy metal band for kids, it would never have taken off.
You need to understand that if you’re entering a new market, you’re going to need to be different. You’re going to need to tailor everything to that new market.
If it’s children, then you need bright colours, ideas that are pitched to a child’s understanding, and most importantly… not boring or “grown-up stuff.”
To counter-point that, there’s an advantage here as well.
Remember the bedroom virtuoso who practices eight hours a day and has honed his craft to absolute perfection?
You don’t have to worry about him anymore.
I wrote about this in this article. In saturated markets, weird things and highly technical things become important. There’s a race to the top in terms of quality and skill and a race to the bottom in terms of price for services.
Hevisaurus doesn’t have to be filled with super-human musicians. The songs don’t have to be penned by the next Mozart. The marketing budget doesn’t need to be massive and the execution doesn’t have to be flawless.
The new market doesn’t care about the technical aspects of your crazy business idea, because they’re too busy being served something new and interesting. (With the caveat that you have to produce a high quality service and do it properly.)
Final Thoughts
To bring this around to some semblance of a point – crazy business ideas are rarely crazy. They look crazy because they do something to differentiate themselves: They target anew market. They deliver something in a novel way.
Whatever it is, you can almost guarantee that the product/service offered is not crazy. It’s simply something new.
If you want to toil away for years on a skill and reach mastery, then you can. But it’s almost always a better idea to become competent at something and then use that skill to fill a new niche or serve a different market.