Business ideas are everywhere, if you know where to look.
Mitch Altman was inspired by a noisy TV in a Chinese restaurant in Palo Alto.
Altman, a 52-year-old electrical engineer, was trying to catch up with old friends over noodles one evening , but the tube was too distracting. “It sucked our brains out,” he says. That day Altman dreamed up a key-fob device that transmits “off” codes for hundreds of TVs at once. But it wasn’t until 2002 that he got around to building the device. He called it TV-B-Gone.
The first 20,000 TV-B-Gones, which sold out in just three weeks in 2004. Now he runs Cornfield Electronics, which employs a dozen people and has sold 140,000 more TV-B-Gones, retailing at $20 apiece. His first year brought in more than $1 million in sales, driven by mentions in the media.
Sales have since slowed to $250,000 a year, and Altman is trying to goose revenues with TV-B-Gone Pro, which transmits more off codes. “I don’t get rich, but I do enough to live the life I love,” he says.
Photo by msnbcmedia3.