The Accidental Millionaires

Some of the best business ideas happen almost by accident. From the inventors of the Slinky to the couple behind the software that powers much of the blogosphere, a look at entrepreneurs who took adversity and half-baked ideas and turned them into wildly successful companies.

Mena and Ben Trott
Previous Lives: Laid-off Web designer and developer
Big Break: Created software for a personal blog
Bottom Line: Software became an industry standard

High school sweethearts from Petaluma, Calif., Mena and Ben Trott got into blogging after losing their jobs at a small San Francisco-based Web design firm in the dot-com bust. With extra time on their hands, they developed a software tool to help Mena post her personal blog. It worked. When they put the tool online in October 2001, nearly 200 people downloaded it within the first hour.

Initially working out of their apartment, the couple launched a software company, hired dozens of employees and raised over $10 million in venture capital. And as blogging took off, the tool they called Movable Type (after the Guttenberg printing press) became an industry standard.

"What had started as a hobby turned into full-time job, complete with 70 hour weeks," Mena says on the company's Web site.

The couple, both in their early 30s, have since added to their fortune by launching other blog publishing applications, including a successful hosting service. After the rapid growth of Movable Type, the couple says their current strategy is to build momentum slowly with a diverse line of inter-related products.

"I can't imagine where we'll be in a year, let alone five years," Mena says.

Richard and Betty James
Previous Life: Navy tool worker and homemaker
Big Break: Saw a spring coil fall off a table
Bottom Line: Called it a Slinky and sold 250 million of them

In 1943, Richard James was a navy tool worker in Philadelphia when he saw a torsion spring coil fall off a workshop table. Later at home, he considered turning the coil into a toy. Betty, his wife, found the term "Slinky" -- a Swedish word for sleek and sinuous in the dictionary. What followed were two years of testing various gauges of steel to find the perfect material and length.

By Christmas 1945, the new toy was ready for the market. The couple made 400 units, which they put on display at a Gimbel's Department Store for $1 each. Within an hour they were sold out.

With the proceeds, the coupled launched the James Spring and Wire Company, later renamed James Industries. Since then, more than 250 million Slinkys have been sold worldwide -- many still manufactured on the original production line.

In the late 1950s, Richard James nearly drove his once thriving business into bankruptcy by donating millions to a Bolivian religious cult that he left the company and his family to join in 1960. He died in obscurity 14 years later.

After her husband left, Betty continued to run the business, expanding its products to include plastic Slinkys, a Slinky dog, and fake glasses with Slinky extended eyeballs. In 2001, she was inducted into the Toy Industry Hall of Fame.

Thales Panagides
Previous Life: Launched an Internet service provider in Brazil
Big Break: Met a fellow Greek expat who made bikinis
Bottom Line: Became the world's largest independent distributor of Brazilian bikinis

In the late 1990s, Thales Panagides was a recent business school graduate from Ball State University in Muncie, Ind., when he flew to Brazil to help his cousin launch a small Internet service provider. He expected to return to the United States after a few weeks.

Based on an idyllic beach in Fortaleza, the small firm -- like so many others in the early days of the dot-com boom -- soon landed funding from a large venture capital group, which forced them to leave their beachfront office for the business district of Sao Paulo.

Despite the firm's success, Panagides longed to return to the beach. Looking to ditch the online world altogether, he started researching local product manufacturers with an eye to setting up a seaside exporting company back in Fortaleza. One of the first factories he visited was owned by a fellow Greek expat whose parents had immigrated to Brazil. The product they made was light-weight, compact and ideal for exporting -- Brazilian bikinis.

Leveraging both his MBA and his online expertise, Panagides bought a few samples and put 10 up for sale on eBay as a simple test. The next morning, seven of the bikinis had active buyers. "It was then that I knew I hit a home run," Panagides tells fellow Ball State alumni on the school's Web site.

Today, www.brazilian-bikinis.net is the largest independent distributor of Brazilian bikinis in the world, selling to retailers in more than 41 countries around the globe. As for himself, Panagides is back on the beach.

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