Missions Impossible

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While the odds are off-putting, at least Bounty of the Sea will have the opportunity to increase them through advertising.

So far Lore Harp, the inventor of Le Funelle, hasn't had that option. Harp, 44, came up with the idea of a funnel through which women can urinate while standing -- so they do not have to come in contact with a toilet seat -- while she was running a California computer company. As founder and chairman of Vector Graphic, Harp had to travel a lot, and when she did she often found the cleanliness of bathrooms left a lot to be desired.

Harp created a product to circumvent the problem, figuring she had a winner. As the number of women professionals increased, Harp thought, so would the market. And so Le Funelle was born. Almost nobody noticed.

"We did a very inoffensive radio spot for it," says L. Neal Amidei, the head of the San Francisco public-relations firm that bears his name. "The gist was: remember how your mother always said make sure the bathroom is clean before you use it? Well, you should buy Le Funelle, because -- and this was the tag line -- `Your mother can't always be with you.'

"We couldn't find a radio station to accept the ad," Amidei adds. "They said it violated their program standards."

The ad's rejection -- coupled with the unusual product -- attracted a lot of attention. "Everyone from Business Week to Omni wrote about it," says Amidei. "We got a lot of press."

But few sales. "I thought it was going to be easy to move into the market," says Harp, with a sigh. "This is a product that is needed, but it's been like pulling teeth to get ads placed in magazines. A lot of them, like the airline magazines, refuse to take them." She sighs again. "A lot of people are not forward thinking."

That apparently includes drugstores and mass merchants. Harp has been unable to get them to carry the product. "The buyers are embarrassed when we talk to them, and they say things like they don't want to stock it because they are afraid of offending someone. It's going to take people with an open mind to sell it."

For now, Harp is offering Le Funelle by mail. She expects to sell 3 million funnels -- a 20-pack goes for $9.96 -- this year, which will put her company, Aplex Corp., in San Mateo, Calif., close to breaking even. Still, Harp had expected national distribution by now, with Le Funelle being as ubiquitous as sanitary napkins.

"Sometimes," she says, "my frustration meter reads very high."

Ironically, of our three entrepreneurs, the one you might expect to be most frustrated -- the man who planned a nationwide chain of clinics that would test for memory loss and the onset of Alzheimer's -- is probably the closest to having a commercial success. "Despite all my efforts," says Thomas Crook with a laugh, "it looks as if we will make money."

Crook, a Ph.D. in psychology, spent 14 years at the National Institutes of Health and left with a simple idea. He would take his expertise in evaluating the effectiveness of drugs designed to improve memory and set up centers to test those drugs for pharmaceutical companies. His Memory Assessment Clinics, based in Bethesda, Md., created a battery of tests to measure memory, and Crook was under way. He eventually had 26 test sites -- everywhere from UCLA to the University of Florence in Italy, and he was making more money than most civil servants could ever imagine. Revenues will hit $2.5 million this year, says Crook, who has the traditional scientist's attitude when it comes to talking about money: he is uncomfortable.

Somewhere along the way, success got Crook to wondering if there might be a mass-market application for his work. After all, he believes his memory tests -- which determine how well people remember such things as faces, phone numbers, directions, and where they put the car keys -- are unique. And with the nation's growing concern with Alzheimer's, surely there was a way for him to put his knowledge to work.

However well intentioned (knowing your memory is still just fine would be a great relief to someone who locked the house key in the house for the sixth time), the idea is, well, macabre. And the number of people who would pay $375 every year to take a memory-monitoring test is probably quite small.

But then Crook was introduced to aging yuppies.

Part of the value of Crook's tests is that they compare your memory with that of people your age. To establish the norm, Crook looked for volunteers over 55 years old to take the tests. Older people responded, but so did youngsters. "They were professionals -- usually in their thirties and forties -- who were under a lot of pressure. Some complained they couldn't remember things as well as they liked. Others were looking for a way to gain an edge." All asked if there were courses they could take, or tapes they could watch, or books they could read to improve their memories.

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