Best Business Idea #1 - The Panera Pathfinder

The Panera Pathfinder

Whether you know it or not, you have a problem, or will, sometime before you die.

I know exactly what you’re thinking. Your verbatim thoughts follow, best read in a mocking, sarcastic, scornful tone: “Oh really, Alex? A problem? Before I die? Why don’t you quit your day job and write copy for fortune cookies?”

Okay, smartypants. You know full well I’m talking about a very specific problem, not observing generalities known to any collection of five or more interconnected neurons. It’s okay, though, because as the saying goes, you can’t have smart pants without a smart brain. And I really only want to communicate with people who have smart brains.

I digress. Back to our very specific problem—that of getting lost. This will happen to all of us, and most of the time, it won’t be a very big deal, as most of us will get lost in a city or town (read: civilization). Such places typically have widely proliferated cellular coverage, offering poor navigators easy salvation, provided they know how to operate Google Maps, Waze, or any of the myriad other navigation apps. Of course, there’s always the danger of taking a wrong turn down Stab Alley or finding oneself in a labyrinthian Electric Vehicle Charging Station Desert, but your primary problem has then become the pointy end of a knife or lack of vehicle propulsion, rather than just not knowing how to get to where you want to go or to get back to where you came from.

On the open highway, where cellular reception can be a little spotty, it is somewhat more possible to get lost, but a dedicated GPS device or pre-downloaded map data on one’s cellular device can remedy these issues. Given the decreased road density, it is significantly easier for you to find your way back where you came from. The worst-case scenario on rural highways is that you run out of gas on the side of the highway and have to flag down a good Samaritan. Worst worst case, that good Samaritan is a serial killer, and you’re in roughly the same predicament as you would have been in Stab Alley. But most of the time, that won’t happen, you’ll figure it out, and you’ll be alright.

Great business ideas are not born by addressing situations that are usually alright. Think garage doors and televisions that you must manually operate. Think about physically having to accomplish the arduous task of plugging in your phone, nightly. Think about having to having to meet and subsequently ask someone out in person. These are the kinds of horrific catastrophes that modern businesses and their various products are purpose-built to solve.

The horrific catastrophe about which I want to pontificate today is getting lost in the worst place imaginable—the woods, or the desert, or some other wilderness for which both you and the cellular network are unprepared. This typically involves transit on foot, which the more pedestrian among you will simply call “walking.” Granted, a purpose-built GPS with terrain data can help you out immensely if you find yourself in such a pickle. But what’s heavy, carries an electric charge, and dies? If you’re thinking “an oversized electric eel”, you’re not wrong; you just aren’t very good with context. If you’re thinking “batteries”, you have the brains for this business venture.

Introducing Best Business Idea #1—a GPS device that dispenses actual, wheat-based, non-gluten-free breadcrumbs!

What It Does

While you’re hiking, mountain biking, etc., the GPS device dispenses real breadcrumbs, which of course are large enough to stay put in winds under 20 knots and are unlikely to be consumed by ants before your outing is complete. Unlike a traditional GPS device, the battery of which will likely die 45 minutes after sunset, while you’re trying to find your way back, and just prior to a critical fork in the trail that could just as easily send you over a cliff as home, the battery of this GPS will die having dispensed breadcrumbs along the entire route. There’s no guesswork with this new-and-improved device, then—if you want navigation home, you simply turn around when the battery dies. I’m not one to dictate details of how you’ll run your own business, but you really should call it the Panera Pathfinder. If you think Panera Bread will take issue with it, you’re probably right. But if you don’t have the courage for that battle, this brilliant business idea probably isn’t for you, anyway.

To fill the device’s crumb hopper, consumers can either crumb their own bread or purchase pre-crumbed bread from you. The benefit of your extremely marked up bread, aside from the obvious benefit to the consumer of not having to convert a bread loaf to crumbs, is that your bread is infused with UV-sensitive food coloring. This allows lost hikers to find their way in the dark given that they have a black light on their person (sold separately, of course).

Those are the basics of the product. Why, then, is this the business idea for you?

Facts

According to the Sierra Club, “[a]n astonishing 600,000 people go missing each year in the United States.” While this statistic has very little to do with the number of people who get lost in the wilderness each year, I’ve chosen it because it’s a staggering number, and the wow factor is far more valuable than quaint concepts like logical relevance.

Relevant Facts

The US National Parks Service (NPS) Search and Rescue (SAR) Dashboard data from 2017 shows 3,453 missions dispatched to find/rescue missing persons on NPS-managed land. At least, that’s what hippie website GreenMatters says. When I went to verify the data from the original source, it did what all government websites do and proved impossible to navigate without an hours-long investment in discovering and cataloging its idiosyncrasies. If they know how to operate the NPS SAR Dashboard, the folks at GreenMatters are clearly either government insiders themselves, or else they are of far superior intellect to my own. Either way, I have no choice but to take them at their word. And since I’m not determined enough to get more data on my own, 2017 is the best I can do in terms of recency.

Assumptions

So, let’s say a few of those missions were dispatched to find parties of multiple lost people. It makes sense to say that people are more likely to get lost on their own, so we should err conservatively when adjusting up for couples, throuples, families, and groups that were lost. Let’s just round it and call it a nice, even 4,000 people missing, shall we?

In that same year, NPS estimated its visitorship at 311,000,000 people, putting the percentage of NPS visitors who got lost to the point they required a search and rescue mission at approximately 0.001286%. If we assume only a third of NPS visitors go galivanting about in the wilderness, the updated percentage of those for whom a search and rescue mission is launched is 0.00386%. By assuming that most disorientations in the wilderness are temporary and do not result in launched search and rescue missions, we can triple our percentage again and arrive at 0.0116%. This is now our working assumption for the percentage of US NPS visitors who get lost in the wilderness.

Data Not Included in Analysis

Plenty of people go hiking and get lost outside of NPS property. Other federally owned and managed property, state parks, municipal parks, and private property also offer plenty of opportunity to turn your north to south and your east to west. I’m too lazy to do the research, so you can use your imagination and just say this is a VERY big number. Or we can just stick the with theme of baselessly tripling things, putting our final percentage at 0.0348%. From our very reasonable starting estimate of 4,000 people, we’ve tripled a few times and ended up at 36,000 total people in the United States wilderness who’ve had at least a panic-inducing moment or two during which they had lost all sense of where they were. Expand your market worldwide, and you have a substantial market indeed.

Your Numbers

(All research is cursory, and all sources are very loosely interpreted)

Startup costs –

R & D $15,000 (Pacific Research Laboratories)

Patent Lawyer $15,000 (BitLaw)

Patent troll *$75,000 (Electronic Frontier Foundation)

Marketing **5-10% of revenue (bdc)

Projected sales price –

Garmin GPS $319.99 (Just Google it)

Toaster $19.99 (Google it)

Total $339.98 (Sum of the above component approximations)

Pre-crumbed bread $7.00 (Your local grocery store price, plus crumbing)

If we make reasonable assumptions about prices, we can estimate how much you’ll make in the first year. Let’s say you sell a mere 2,000 units in that first year. After R&D, paying the patent lawyer, patent troll, etc., you’re in the hole approximately $10k. However, if you sell an average of 10 loaves’ worth of breadcrumbs to each of your customers, you’re profiting a healthy $81k. If nothing changes the following year, you’ll nearly double your profit because you’ll be done paying the patent troll. But of course, you’re a genius, so you’ll probably double your sales of both devices and bread, resulting in a profit of nearly $270k. Frankly, this is a no-brainer.

Much like cartridge replacements are the real money maker for manual razor sales, the pre-crumbed bread loaves are the real money maker for the breadcrumb-dispensing GPS.

*You can pay the troll, or you can pay the lawyer to defend you from the troll. Odds are that, with a product like this, someone has patented aspects of GPS design. Or breadcrumb dispensers. Or breadcrumbs. Business owner, beware!

**By reducing revenue to zero, one can also reduce this expense to zero. Math is amazing!

Marketing Strategy #1

Neither the raw numbers nor the percentages of disoriented adventurers are noteworthy, so it will be best not to mention them to your potential market. Rather, you will need to exploit, with the utmost dexterity, humanity’s deepest, most primal fear—the fear of a dead battery. Even the whisper of the chance of this fear coming to fruition is enough to drive the silliest irrationalities in human behavior.

The breadcrumbs are your ace in the hole. Their battery will never die because, well, they have none. This is exceedingly important because the fear of a dead battery is not primarily about the battery itself, but about what that battery provides. First, it provides instantaneous access to knowledge of nearly any sort, so that we can be relieved from the expectation to really know anything or reason anything out. Second, the battery provides connection to social media, which humankind conflates with social connection. The battery, then, is an archetype for access to knowledge and half-hearted interpersonal connections.

You need to replace the battery with the breadcrumb. Archetypically, in case that wasn’t clear. Convince your market that they will have knowledge of where they’ve been that will outlast a battery, and you’ll have your foot in the door. Convince them that those breadcrumbs are a physical manifestation of some inner (preferably vaguely spiritual) journey, and you’ll have them eating those breadcrumbs out of the palm of your hand.

And the breadcrumbs, unlike battery-enabled social pseudo-connections, can be followed by real people who want to literally walk in your footsteps and share a journey with you to connect with you where you are. Emphasize the shared journey to a shared destination, and you’re sure to satisfy all the deepest desires that battery anxiety is really about. Emphasize real, in-person connection, and you may actually scare away some of your more faint-hearted potential consumers. Counterintuitively, that’s okay, because the people you are trying to reach are the adventuresome and slightly insane sort who enjoy activities like adventuring in unfamiliar and remote terrain shared with bears, leopards, hippopotami, cougars, and general lack of shelter from both the elements and natural disasters. People with aspirations like these are likely among the few you will find who have the courage for a deep, in-person connection, which is exactly what you’re selling. When you’ve convinced your market you can provide that, the few who want it will be happy to pay whatever price you ask.

Marketing Strategy #2

If preying on human psychological vulnerabilities as in Strategy #1 fails, simply convince your market that not only do the breadcrumbs serve your navigational needs, but they also function as a last-ditch snack option in a survival/starvation situation. People love dual-purpose stuff, especially when simpler solutions to each of the problems are readily accessible. Use this to your advantage.

Are You Ready?

You might be thinking there’s no way that this would work. You might be thinking that I am a lunatic for recommending this idea. You might also remember that I told you in my About section that not everyone would have what it takes to make these ideas work for them. If you’re thinking that there’s no way for you to make a breadcrumb-dispensing GPS device into a viable business, you’re probably right, you’re probably feeble-minded, and you probably don’t have what it takes. But if you’re thinking to yourself, “what I wild and crazy idea! I wonder how I can be the one to make it work,” you just might have the right disposition to run your own business.

Looking forward to hearing your success stories so that I can brag,

Alex Adler