In May 2015 when Alex Craig saw a viral post of a potato with a postal stamp that was mailed to someone, he came up with an idea. The idea was to allow people to ‘send potatoes with fully customized and anonymous messages’.
When Craig discussed this idea with his girlfriend, she said that it was the stupidest idea she had ever heard of and that he wouldn’t sell even a single potato. Alex nevertheless went ahead and worked on his idea and soon launched the website https://potatoparcel.com/. The site allowed people to send a potato to anyone across the United States with a personalized message or a picture. A normal text message on a potato then cost $9.99 and a potato with a picture cost about $14.99. Within a day of launching, the site had its first sale and within 2 days had over $2,000 worth of orders!
The company also featured on the popular series Shark Tank, where they received a $50,000 investment against 10% equity in the company. By 2017 the company had sold over 70,000 potatoes and earned over $700,000 in sales.
Wonder what worked about this idea? Was it the novelty of the idea of sending potatoes with messages that really clicked or was it something else?
Interestingly, Potato Parcel was not the first of its kind potato messaging service. In January 2014, Sean Din has launched ‘Mail A Spud’ https://www.mailaspud.com/, a very similar concept of sending a potato with a customized message on it. While this company is still going strong, they never became as popular as Potato Parcel did, despite the fact that their products are slightly cheaper than Potato Parcel.
So the next time you think of a business idea, it need not be a high tech one. It could be as simple as a message on a carrot !
In 2005 Jay Rege, along with his wife Jothsna Rege, co-founded Academy One, a career guidance and study abroad counseling venture. Prior to co-founding Academy One, he worked as a software developer with HCL Technologies. He holds a computer engineering degree from Mumbai University and a MBA from the Mays Business School at Texas A&M University, USA. He has also been a visiting faculty at a few colleges where he teaches topics related to entrepreneurship.