Access Spikes Ferret Feet

Let me show you a great way to access news articles, a unique business idea, an amazing art gallery and the ending of a book which is just written so beautifully. Let’s get into it.

Have you ever clicked on a news story and then you visit the story page on (let’s say) The New York Times and the content disappears and a message pops up saying “Create your free account or log in to continue,” you’ve seen those annoying things, right? Various news outlets do it different ways, but basically you have to register, you have to buy a subscription to that news service to read the article and that sucks. Let me show you how to get around this (without paying).

When you get to one of those locked news stories go up to the URL bar and copy the URL of the news story. With the news story URL copied, open a new tab in your browser and visit archive.ph. On that site you’ll see a red box, click into that box and paste that URL and then hit the “Go” button. What’s going to happen now is that a bot is going to go to that news story and bring over the content so you can read it and not have to register. I should mention that it does not work with all news outlet websites but it does work on most of them, I use that all the time. 

Let’s get into money. On a previous episode of the show, I talked about separating your inputs from outputs, and I got some feedback saying, “Yeah, that’s great, but I don’t have any ideas of things that I can sell over and over again.” not a problem! In general terms, business is finding customers that have a problem and charging them money to solve it for them. For example, if you’re hungry, go to a restaurant, give them five bucks for a cheeseburger, you’re no longer hungry and the restaurant made five bucks. You need to get around your city, go to a car dealership, give them some money, and you will get a car. Very simple. But you might say, “Well, I don’t have any solutions to sell people.” I got you, just wait!

If you go to reddit.com/r/functionalprint, that is going to take you to the subreddit for 3D printers. This is basically an online forum for people to show off solutions to problems that they solved by making something with a 3D printer. You see where this is going? These are people that have solutions to problems they personally faced… and those solutions would most likely fix the same problem other people have. 

Let me show you just a few of these solutions:

This first one looks like a small cup, it’s sort of triangular and it has a flat back with a hole in it and the caption says “I was tired of all the dust I was getting while making holes in the drywall. This solved my issue!” How genius, I know that’s happened to me many times. When you bang a nail into a wall, all kinds of crap falls down the side of your wall on to the baseboard and floor, and you have to pick it up. Well, you can just put this thing on the wall to catch all that stuff. Now, that’s not the most significant problem in the world, but it is a problem that can be solved. Let’s keep going.

The caption on this next one is “Tightened up the bathroom counter a bit.” and it looks like he used to put his Alexa device on the counter in the bathroom but he 3D printed a holder that has two circles, the smaller circle which goes over the electrical outlet, and a bigger circle that goes over the device. This 3D print holds the Alexa device on the wall and is no longer on the counter. Another problem solved! Let’s keep going. 

This one looks like a sort of handle with a grippy thing on the end, and the grippy thing is attached to the faucet knobs. The caption is “Designed the faucet handle so I can use my elbow instead of my dirty hands.” That’s great. Now, who would that be a solution for? Probably someone in the construction industry or someone who works on cars. They get all dirty at work, they come home, they touch the faucet, and now the faucet knob has all that dirt on it. With this simple solution you can just use your elbow to turn on the water. Problem solved! 

You know those big jugs of laundry detergent you can buy at the grocery store? It looks like this person printed a funnel that you put the cap on and it funnels the leftover liquid back in. Because how many times do you pour laundry detergent into the laundry but you still have a bit of that liquid on the bottom of the cup? This 3D print just uses gravity, and it drains it back into the bottle. Another problem solved!

This one’s interesting too. The caption says “Tired of cleaning the drips on my fridge, made a retractable drip tray.” It looks like just a little piece of plastic that goes under the nozzle of a big jug of liquid (probably iced tea or lemonade) that’s in the fridge. I totally know what this person means! Let’s say you open the spout, fill up your glass, then close the spout, a little bit of the iced tea is going to drip out and get on the bottom of the fridge… but not with this little retractable thing here! Smart!

This one looks like something that goes over the light switch on the wall. You know how electrical outlets usually have two screws, well it looks like he sort of made something that comes over the top of the light switch and extends down so you can’t flick the light switch on without having to move it to the side. Accidentally flipping the light switch on is no longer an issue!

This captions says “I created the system of Lego-compatible wall mounts.” It looks like he made little pieces of plastic that you can attach to the wall that have those little circles that are on the Legos pieces. Legos are a huge business and people take it very seriously so let’s say you make a beautiful Lego Starship thingy (I don’t know much about legos or Star Wars), and you want to show it off, well now instead of just putting it on the counter or on a table now you can mount your Lego creation on the wall. 

And here’s the last one, and one of my favorites!

It’s a picture of the handlebars on a wheelchair and it says, “I made these spikes to stop helpful people from grabbing me without consent.” I guess this guy (who’s in a wheelchair) sometimes gets pushed around against his will so he made three rows of spikes for the handles so that when someone grabs the handles they get a little prick! When I saw this, I was like, wow, that’s great! I think if I was in a wheelchair, that’d be really annoying if people were doing that. These spikes would solve that problem.

That’s what this is all about: solving problems. 

Now you might go, that’s great Ian! But how do these 3D things help me? 

If you’re looking to start a business and you just don’t have any ideas of what you can do, I would go to Reddit and go to that functional print subreddit and find the top five 3D prints that solve the biggest problems you can think of. There’s a ton of 3D prints to go through so you’ll be there for a while but once you’ve found them, send a message to the person that posted it and say something like “I’d like to buy 10 of these in order to resell them.” 

Always be upfront and honest about what you are doing. 

I don’t know how much they will charge you but let’s say you buy ten of each so now you have fifty pieces of inventory for a business that sells solutions to problems. Now what do you do?

I know that this next step is going to be more difficult for others, but now you need to make a website. Of course you could sell them on eBay or Etsy but I personally would try to make your own website so you can start building a brand. Getting your own website is not that difficult, you can take a look at Shopify or BigCommerce or Squarespace. A lot of these places make it really easy to set up a shop, so however you do it, get a website and add all your products to it. 

When you add a product to any ecommerce system you have to write a product description, and what’s important to remember here is that you’re not selling hunks of plastic, you’re selling solutions to people’s problems. 

DON’T say something like “Here’s three rings of spikes you can use to put in the back of your wheelchair.” No, that’s a terrible description. No one’s gonna buy that. 

Try and get into the mind of the person that has the problem that this solution can fix. Write a description like this “You know, if you’re in a wheelchair and you’re on your way down the street, and all of a sudden you start heading in the opposite direction of where you want to go, and then you turn around and you see some ‘helpful’ person behind you pushing you. If there was only a way to stop this, well, these spikes are for you!” Come with a clever name like “Don’t Roll Me Spikes” or something like that. Just remember that people are going to pay a lot more money for solutions to their problems than they will pay for little pieces of plastic. 

BONUS TIP: If you can find solutions that fix problems with existing brands and interests that will make it easier to sell as you’ll already have interest in those solutions and those potential buyers will be easier to find. Think of the Lego mount and the Alexa holder.

Once you’ve sold a bunch of these, think about buying your own 3D printer (or finding an online 3D printing company like CraftCloud3D to lower your production costs. Once you have a way to produce these on your own, go back to the people on Reddit that you got the original stock items from and basically say, “Hey listen, this print sold really well, can you give me the file? I’ll give you a licensing fee of 50 cents for each piece sold.” They get a licensing fee for their work, you get to lower your production costs.

Don’t ever steal things. Don’t be shady.

Okay, that was a really long one, let’s talk about museums! I found an incredible museum called The Museum of Bad Art and this is what their website says “The Museum of Bad Art is the world’s only Museum dedicated to the collection, exhibition, and celebration of bad art in all its forms.” What a great idea! It’s like that show Nailed !t on Netflix. It’s basically the same thing, right? Nailed It is these bakers who make cakes and pastries that all look terrible and it’s really funny!

You can visit museumofbadart.org to see more awful art but let me share a few with you here. 

First up is the “Non-seeing eye dog”, so it’s a dog with no eyes that I guess it’s a seeing eye dog. Perfect! Love it! 

Next is a religious-looking woman with a bucket in one hand and a broom in the other, and this is titled “Our Lady of Perpetual Housework”. Love that! Here we have “Medusa frying a fish” and she has a very see-through dress on. Why is Medusa frying a fish? I don’t know. I’m assuming she’s hungry. Great, great piece of work here! 

And next up is some real nightmare fuel! It seems that someone got taxidermy service for a deer, a turtle, a raccoon and an armadillo, and then separated various pieces from those four animals and put them all together in a nightmarish kind of way and created a “Deerturtlecunadillo”. I don’t know what you do with that other than maybe put it at your door, and it’ll keep people away. It’s awful. It’s terrible. 

And lastly, my favorite! It’s the “Ferret in a brothel.” I mean, just that title is fantastic! Why is a ferret in a brothel? I don’t know. Maybe he’s not too good with the ladies. There’s a lot going on here, but I was looking at this for a while and I noticed that it’s actually a bow on the ferret’s head! I’m wondering if this ferret isn’t so much a customer and more of an employee. Regardless, it’s incredible. The Museum of Bad Art. I mean, what’s not to love about that?

What’s really interesting about this Museum? It’s the opposite of what you would expect going to an art museum, right? You’re expecting to go into an art museum and things are going to be beautiful, they’re going to be lovely, but this museum did the direct opposite of that.

Can you do something similar in your museum? 

Let’s say that you are a technology museum, like a super-futuristic museum. What if you had an exhibit about, I don’t know… rocks? Like, here are all things you can do with a rock. Visitors would be like… what? It’s going to get people’s attention because it’s completely different from what they’re expecting to see. 

Let’s say that you were a zoo. Typically in a zoo you have humans looking at animals in cages. What if you did the opposite of that? What if you somehow figured it out where humans could come up through a cage, and have the animals around them? So it’s literally the opposite of a regular zoo. Have humans in the cage and have animals staring at them. 

Any ideas that provide unique experiences that are the opposite of what people expect is probably a great idea.

Alright, let’s talk about the ending of a really crazy book! The book is called “Brave New World” by Aldous Huxley. The book is kind of like a “1984” dystopian hellscape, kind of like that. If you’re planning on reading this, there’s going to be major spoilers here so STOP READING THIS! I don’t want to spoil it for you and is going to be a MAJOR SPOILER ! 

If you haven’t clicked away yet, I’m going to keep going!

At the end of the book the main character (they call him “Savage”) lives in a lighthouse and a bunch of people are going to this lighthouse to confront Savage. Here are the last few paragraphs from this book:

“Savage!” called the first arrivals, as they alighted from their machine. “Mr. Savage!” 

There was no answer.

The door of the lighthouse was ajar. They pushed it open and walked into a shuttered twilight. Through an archway on the further side of the room they could see the bottom of the staircase that led up to the higher floors. Just under the crown of the arch dangled a pair of feet.

“Mr. Savage!”

Slowly, very slowly, like two unhurried compass needles, the feet turned towards the right; north, north-east, east, south-east, south, south-south-west; then paused, and, after a few seconds, turned as unhurriedly back towards the left. South-south-west, south, south-east, east.

And that’s the end of the book! 

What an incredible way to describe someone committing suicide. It’s an awful thing, but I was like, you know, if I was going to write about someone committing suicide it would never occur to me to focus on their feet and relate that to the directions of a compass. It’s a very shocking way to end a book.