Where Great Ideas for New Businesses Come From

Many whimsically started businesses share another characteristic: they take on lives of their own despite some founders' initial reluctance to go into business. That momentum is a measure of each founder's unerring sense of market -- and of his or her enviable energy level. As wacky as some enterprises may have been at the beginning, there was no stopping any of them once they got going. Each accidental entrepreneur started out meaning only to have a little fun or to accommodate a few favors or to do something better than someone else -- just for a while. But the whimsically started businesses that endure -- as Starving Students moving company has done for 20 years -- inevitably surrender their "aw shucks" origins and turn serious. Invariably, the initial (and appropriate) instinct is to channel internally generated cash straight into real marketing, spreading the product beyond the few tolerant friends and relatives who made up the initial market. Mambosok's hilarious hatmakers have gotten wise: today they field 10 sales reps across the nation.

One last distinction: however tempting it may be to other sectors of commerce, it's not in the character of most accidental entrepreneurs to take shortcuts with quality. They are natural product makers, not profit takers. A passionate love of product or process, or a concern for service usually binds the soon-to-be company builders to their fiscal destinies.

Such happened to Jim Miller, founder of bootstrapped yacht outfitter the Rigging Co. (now an Inc. 500 company). He paid for a plane trip to execute an emergency boat repair out of his own shallow pocket and soon found himself recognized as someone who cared. Explaining his unwillingness to charge what the market obviously would have borne, Miller comes up with a refrain that should be familiar to any student of accidental entrepreneurship: "I was in business but didn't know it at the time."

Oh, sure. -- Robert A. Mamis

Founded on Frolic
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The Making of Mambosok
For Dan Hoard and Tom Bunnell, two boyhood buddies in search of a good time, starting a business was simple, really. All you had to do was take a joke just a little too seriously and a little too far. How else could two apparently sane individuals justify selling Mambosoks -- defined by Bunnell as socks for one's head -- as a bona fide business opportunity?

Only an unbridled pursuit of fun can account for the adventure the partners began when Hoard first lopped off a pants leg and put it on his head. "What else would you do with it?" says Hoard, who did the deed in the heat of an Australian summer in 1989, while he and Bunnell were backpacking down under.

"We would sit in front of the mirror and cry laughing," remembers Bunnell. "We said, 'We have to sell this. We have to at least try.'" They came up with a name for their invention -- the Mambosok ("It sounded festive," Bunnell explains) -- and began research and development. Their rigorous R&D consisted of driving around the Pacific Northwest in a beat-up van, looking for suitable heads on which to place their sock. "We'd look at people and say, 'He could wear a Mambosok. She could wear a Mambosok,'" says Hoard. They even seeded the market a little. Bunnell passed out five Mambosoks to members of his wedding party in 1990, and they promptly did the polka in them at the reception.

With all that research under their mambo, the two decided to get serious. They contracted a manufacturer and produced the first 1,000 Mambosoks in the spring of 1991. Tom, who was tending bar to pay the bills, figured he'd sell a few to patrons. The socks were gone in two weeks, proving one of two hypotheses: either a market really did exist or drinking does impair one's judgment.

Perhaps it demonstrated both: the Seattle duo moved $200,000 worth of headsocks in the first six months and rang up sales of $1 million in year two.

The founders have never devised a business plan: "Good thing," says Hoard. "We never would have planned to be a million-dollar business." And, thankfully, their idea was utterly unfinanceable: they still hold all the equity.

Blessed in the beginning with na??vete about the risks and rigors of the rag trade and business in general, the two buddies have since been transformed. The demands of growth have turned them into (gasp) business guys. "When the bank-account balance went under $100," says Hoard, "we said, 'OK, maybe we've got to plan a little better.'" They decided to unearth the invoices they'd stashed in the basement and learn what people meant by cash flow. And when knockoffs inevitably appeared, they were quick to defend themselves by diversifying. "We figured, What could the life span of one silly hat be, anyway?" says Bunnell. The company extended its line to more than 60 items of Mambosok-wear, including the three-foot Polar Dunce Cap, the Mambohead Shirt, and the Chubby Summer Snowboarding Shorts.

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