Not every revolutionary idea always meets with all praises; some have to face the wrath and be persistent in order to succeed. A lot of entrepreneurs were told that their ideas were stupid and incapable of succeeding in the real world. However, because the entrepreneurs chose to hang on, they could make it big.
Here are a few successful ideas which were called stupid:
1. Thomas Edison’s teachers deemed that he was “too stupid to learn anything” and was fired from jobs for being unproductive. His initial attempts at making the light bulb were also criticized and called an impossible one. However, even after failing 1000 times, he chose to not give up and made his idea work and how!
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2. When Pinterest raised money for their idea, it had to face immense amount of backlash from people who claimed that the idea was lame and it was just a system of bookmarking. Some people on Quora also expressed surprise as to how such a stupid concept could raise so much money.
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3. Alexander Graham Bell had to face a fair share of struggles to make his unique and difficult idea work. A company on hearing his idea commented “What use could this company make of an electrical toy?” With grit and belief in his idea, he chose to not give up until he made the telephone on which our lives almost depend today.
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4. Kevin Systrom, the founder of Instagram, was an ex-Google employee whose idea was heavily criticized by an article in TechCrunch in 2010. From the article, it can be inferred that this app was called useless as it didn’t have a real business model and nobody would pay for an app with mindless filters. Currently, Instagram is the most popular photo sharing app.
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5. The idea of Uber was criticized to such an extent by TechCrunch that the idea was called a fraud and complete crap and also explained how their Monopoly wasn’t going to work. Uber is currently the leading taxi aggregator globally and a true success story as just seven months after this headline bashing the idea was released, TechCrunch released another article which spoke about how Uber raised money from investors for their idea.