Serendipity: finding things that were never actively sought, but having them turn out to be invaluable. This usually happens when we make uncommon connections and end up with something we hadn’t thought of.
In entrepreneurship, this means happening upon strange yet genius business ideas that come when you least expect them. However, these ideas are often invaluable due to their ingenuity. Many current successful companies began as unprecedented ideas!
Twitter, originally called Twttr, was started in 2006 by, most notably, Noah Glass, Jack Dorsey, and Florian Webb. With over 100 million users who send more than 340 million tweets a day, it’s now one of the top social media platforms globally. However, Twitter was never intended to be its own product. Rather, it was a side project that had been endorsed by a company called Odeo, where all the Twitter founders worked. It began as a simple broadcasting system that would broadcast a text sent to one person to all the user’s friends in a contact list.
- Spanx
Sara Blakely did not intend for Spanx, a body-shaping undergarment, to become the commercial success that it is today. After graduating from Florida State University, Blakely worked as a fax machine salesman. Whilst working in the heat and humidity, she decided that she needed an undergarment that fit her specifications. Investing her life savings of just around $5,000 plus a $350 patent fee, she created her company. She would go on to promote Spanx at department stores, which would lead to her securing many deals until Spanx became a worldwide sensation. As of 2020, the company is estimated to generate about $400 million in profit annually.
The story of Facebook is a tale as old as time, even spawning a blockbuster movie. However, this is definitely one of the greatest examples of serendipitous business successes. Considering that Mark Zuckerberg created the first prototype of Facebook (then called Facemash) to be a ‘hot or not’ rating system only for students at Harvard University, business was definitely not his intention. It was relaunched after being taken down and the rest is history, making it the most unintentional business success.