Man Makes $10K a Month With 'Stupidest' Idea Ever

When Alex Craig pitched a business idea to his girlfriend over dinner one night earlier this year, her instant reaction was, "This is the stupidest idea I've ever heard," he tells WFAA. But Craig was determined to see his inspiration take root—and now, just a few months later, PotatoParcel is here, bringing in more than $10,000 in profit per month for the Texas entrepreneur. His brainchild: Charge customers between $8 and $10 for a potato, write a custom message on it with a Pilot G210 retractable rollerball pen, and mail it (anonymously) to the recipient of the customer's choice. "I would say the two things that hold everyone back in life is fear and doubt," he says, explaining what drew him to this project. "The fear of failure and the fear of wasting your time, and the doubt that you can actually achieve something big on a huge scale."

Craig knew soon after promoting his service that "huge" was an apt way to describe public reaction. At the very least, he proved wrong his girlfriend, who had proclaimed, "You will not sell a single potato." "On our second day that we were live … we started promoting it on Reddit and we got $2,000 in orders, and I just knew this was it," he tells WFAA. They've sold more than 2,000 tubers since the site's launch in May. What's really "cool," according to Craig, is that "it takes me about 30 seconds to write on a potato." And that, "in some sort of weird way, we've had an impact on somebody's life—even for a split second," he says. He also may have become, as BroBible notes, "the first man in history who figured out how to make Reddit profitable." (Just don't send potatoes to this guy, whatever you do.)