Has anyone created a product out of a joke?

haha Love it!

@whitandersonIV also has been creating a lot of funny ones, with BadUnicornVC

This is hilarious. I love it. 😂

Can I ask what you used to make your landing page? It's beautiful!

From my end, my partner and I were arguing with each other over who does more chores around the house. He threw out an offhand comment that maybe I should build an app to track it so we could know once and for all, instead of arguing with each other.

It's been in a semi-finished state for a while - thanks for reminding me to get back to it and get a beta up!

My very first foray into eCommerce was based on a joke.

In 2011 I was traveling in Vietnam and kept seeing Ho Chi Minh commemorative merchandise like plates and spoons and whatever. I realise it wasnt exactly culturally sensitive, but it became a bit of a running joke with some fellow travelers i was hanging out with, because the items were just so strange.

As a joke i set up a cafepress with dumb merch like mugs and frisbees with the faces of communist leaders and slapped it online. Whole thing in like 2 hours, got a laugh out of my travel buddies, and forgot about it.

Then a few months later Kim Jong-il died and the site actually did a few thousand in revenue. Not exactly life changing, but certainly one of those moments where you realise that effort does not always equal outcome.

Not me but few i saw recently are , vscode stories extension, github stories chrome extension

I once had a cocktail joke. Now it has become a product that I like very much

Virtual Mojito

I was joking around with friends and somehow ended up making a Discord bot where you can grow your "e-penis". Now it has 20,000 active users and is quite possibly one of the strangest side-projects ive ever made.

https://ppbot.me if anyone wants to check it out

loved the landing page. How did you create it ? @KevinPicchi

I made "Adult Franz Finder" for my friend Franz for his bday. It's no longer online but you can see it here (nsfw): https://web.archive.org/web/20130524062020/http://adultfranzfinder.com/

Super cool product 👏. @k3vin It would be interesting to learn about the technology behind it. Did you write Freezingcam in native macOS code?

I sometimes do this kind of thing -- building a silly idea to see what comes of it -- in a game jam setting. Game Jams are usually 24 hour to week long coding events where people try and build a game either solo or with a small team.

These usually aren't products, per-se, but 'jokes' of an idea. Like, something that's not profitable, not really a business, but something possibly worth doing and might make someone smile. The best, and currently easiest to point to, one of these I've made is https://www.thiswebsitewillselfdestruct.com. It's a website that people can write letters to about how they're doing, and what's going on in their lives, and also view those letters. If nobody posts for 24 hours, the site destroys itself (for real, the whole database is wiped.) I made the first version in 5 hours for the Ludum Dare game jam, when the theme was 'Keep it alive.' For me, the 'joke' was about questioning what a minimalist web game was, and what it means to keep something alive.

It's been going for over 7 months, has had over 20 million views, and over 125,000 letters written to it. But really, it's a silly idea, that was kind of a joke of a game I wanted to submit to a game jam when I couldn't come up with any other ideas. I've subsequently spent probably 80 hours working on spam and hate message filtering issues, performance, scaling. I've also had to get in touch with one state's cybercrime division when someone posted a potentially threatening message that was screenshotted and went viral somewhere else. (Nothing ever came of the threat, thankfully, or I'd have probably already shut down the service.) I've received some donations that have helped it almost break even, but it's certainly not a viable income source for me.

I hope that counts.