This is Part 1 of a series on making a fortune with low competition.
Introduction
Most people look for business opportunities in all the obvious places.
Artificial intelligence.
Software startups.
Ecommerce.
Real estate.
The problem is that millions of other people are looking in exactly the same places.
Meanwhile, some entrepreneur is quietly making a fortune selling a yodelling pickle.
Another built a billion-dollar company selling wet wipes to men.
Another turned bottled water into a cult brand by covering the cans with skulls and calling it Liquid Death.
And somewhere, right now, someone is probably making money selling something so absurd that if you heard the idea at a dinner party, you’d laugh and immediately change the subject.
That would be a mistake.
Because hidden inside many of the world’s most unlikely products are some of the most valuable business lessons you’ll ever learn.
The entrepreneurs behind these products didn’t invent revolutionary technology or create entirely new industries. Instead, they noticed opportunities that other people ignored. They saw humor where others saw nonsense. Identity where others saw commodities. Stories where others saw ordinary products.
This three-part series is about those opportunities.
In Part One, we’ll examine ten unusual products that generated remarkable success while facing little direct competition.
In Part Two, we’ll reverse-engineer the patterns behind those successes and turn them into a practical idea-generation system.
And in Part Three, we’ll use dozens more real-world examples to help you spot profitable opportunities of your own.
Because once you understand why these products worked, you’ll start seeing opportunities where everyone else sees ordinary things.
And that’s a skill that can change the way you look at business forever.
10 Unusual Products Making a Fortune with Almost No Competition
These products may sound like jokes, yet they have collectively generated hundreds of millions—perhaps billions—of dollars in sales.
Let’s find out why.
The Yodeling Pickle
The Yodeling Pickle is exactly what it sounds like: a plastic pickle that yodels. No apps. No AI. No blockchain. No subscription plan. You press the pickle, it yodels, and somehow that has generated years of sales and an almost cult-like following.
The product began in 2007 when Seattle novelty company Archie McPhee held a contest to find someone to record a yodel for a toy. The winning yodel became the sound inside what would eventually become the now-famous Yodeling Pickle. Then things got strange.
The Today Show featured it. Kathie Lee Gifford sang along with it on national television. Even more bizarrely, the Grammy-winning band Gorillaz used the actual pickle yodel on one of their albums. Somewhere along the way, a novelty pickle crossed over into pop culture.
Not bad for a product that contributes absolutely nothing to human progress.
And that’s precisely the lesson.
Most entrepreneurs spend their time trying to make products more useful. The Yodeling Pickle succeeded because it became more shareable. Nobody buys it because they need a yodeling pickle. They buy it because they need to see someone else’s reaction to a yodeling pickle.
That’s an important distinction.
The product lives in a tiny niche inside an even tinier niche: musical novelty gifts. There is no fierce battle for market dominance. No billion-dollar corporations fighting over yodel-based produce. No armies of copycats flooding the market. In fact, the competition is so small it might fit comfortably inside a minivan.
The Yodeling Pickle proves that sometimes the best business opportunity isn’t finding a huge market. It’s finding a ridiculous market that nobody else wants.
The internet rewards products that make people laugh, point at their screens, and say, “You have got to see this.”
A yodeling pickle is not a product. It’s a conversation starter disguised as a pickle.
DUDE Wipes: How a Wet Wipe Became a Billion-Dollar Brand
Most entrepreneurs think they need a groundbreaking invention. The founders of DUDE Wipes proved that sometimes all you need is a different story.
The company launched in 2012 when four childhood friends from Chicago noticed something interesting: plenty of men were already using baby wipes. They just weren’t exactly proud to be seen buying them. Baby wipes felt like they belonged in the diaper aisle. They felt parental, clinical, and, for many guys, vaguely embarrassing to toss into a shopping cart.
So the founders didn’t reinvent the product.
They reinvented the positioning.
The wipe inside the package was still a wipe. It cleaned exactly what wipes have cleaned for decades. What changed was the framing. Instead of selling baby wipes, they sold DUDE Wipes. The same product suddenly came wrapped in bold packaging, blunt humor, and a brand identity that felt masculine, funny, and unapologetic.
In other words, they didn’t change the product. They changed the customer’s permission to buy it.
That shift turned out to be worth a fortune.
After appearing on Shark Tank and securing a $300,000 investment from Mark Cuban, the company expanded through retail partnerships, social media, influencers, and content marketing that leaned heavily into comedy. Instead of pretending bathroom humor didn’t exist, DUDE Wipes built an entire brand around it.
The results speak for themselves. By 2026, the company had surpassed $1 billion in lifetime sales, expanded to more than 20 SKUs across multiple Walmart aisles, and reported a 35% repeat purchase rate.
Most marketers stop at the gimmick. DUDE Wipes shows what happens when a memorable hook is paired with a product people actually like using. The joke opens the door, but the experience keeps customers in the room.
The lesson is simple: You don’t always need a new product. Sometimes the biggest opportunity is taking something familiar and giving it a completely different personality.
Liquid Death: How Water Became a Billion-Dollar Brand
Bottled water is one of the most crowded, boring, and commoditized product categories on the planet. Every brand talks about purity, mountains, glaciers, wellness, hydration, or some mystical spring hidden deep in a forest where apparently only marketing teams are allowed to visit.
Liquid Death looked at all of that and went in the opposite direction.
Instead of peaceful blue labels and serene nature imagery, the company wrapped its canned water in skulls, heavy metal graphics, and a brand voice that sounded like it should be touring with a rock band. Their slogan wasn’t about hydration. It was about “murdering your thirst.”
The product itself was still water but the identity was completely different.
The company’s first commercial reportedly cost just $1,500 to produce, with another $3,000 spent on Facebook ads. Within months, Liquid Death had accumulated more Facebook followers than Aquafina, despite competing against a brand backed by PepsiCo’s massive marketing budget.
That’s when things got interesting.
The company leaned even harder into the joke, creating content about demons, zombies, death cults, and internet chaos while behaving less like a beverage company and more like an entertainment brand that happened to sell water. Over time, that strategy helped propel Liquid Death to a reported valuation of roughly $1.4 billion.
Think about how absurd that is.
A company selling one of the oldest products in human history built a billion-dollar brand largely by refusing to act like a water company.
That’s the lesson.
Liquid Death didn’t win because it had better water. Most customers couldn’t tell the difference in a blind taste test. It won because it gave people a story to buy into. While every other water brand competed on hydration, Liquid Death competed on identity.
For marketers, that’s the real gold here. If everyone in your industry is wearing the same uniform, don’t try to become the best version of the uniform.
Show up dressed as the exact opposite.
Sometimes the fastest way to stand out isn’t to improve the product.
It’s to completely reinvent the personality.
The Pink Stuff: How a Cleaning Paste Became a Social Media Superstar
A bottle of cleaner sitting on a shelf isn’t exactly riveting entertainment. Consumers assume every brand claims to remove stains, cut grease, and make life easier. After a while, all the promises start sounding the same.
Then along came The Pink Stuff.
At first glance, it looks almost too simple to become a phenomenon. It’s a bright pink cleaning paste designed to remove burnt-on food, grime, grease, and stubborn stains from surfaces like ovens, cookware, countertops, and stovetops. Not exactly the sort of thing you’d expect to generate millions of views online.
But that’s exactly what happened.
The secret wasn’t the product description.
It was the demonstration.
Social media platforms, especially TikTok, became flooded with videos showing filthy ovens, stained cookware, and years of built-up grime seemingly disappearing in seconds. The formula created the kind of visual transformation that social media algorithms absolutely love: ugly becomes beautiful, dirty becomes clean, chaos becomes order.
And people couldn’t stop watching.
The product became so popular that more than 40,000 units were reportedly purchased on Amazon in a single month. Suddenly, a cleaning paste had become a viral sensation.
What’s fascinating is that The Pink Stuff didn’t rely on complicated messaging, celebrity endorsements, or elaborate storytelling. The product itself became the content. A single before-and-after video often communicated more than an entire advertising campaign ever could.
That’s a powerful lesson for marketers.
Some products need clever copy.
Some products need emotional storytelling.
And some products simply need a camera.
The Pink Stuff succeeds because it creates an instant, satisfying visual payoff. Nobody needs to read ten paragraphs of sales copy when they can watch a thirty-year-old stain disappear in fifteen seconds. The transformation does all the convincing.
For marketers, that’s the real takeaway. If your product creates a dramatic before-and-after result, stop talking about it so much and start showing it.
Sometimes the most persuasive marketing isn’t an argument.
It’s proof.
Squatty Potty: How a Plastic Stool Became a Viral Sensation
Squatty Potty solved a problem nobody wanted to discuss.
The product itself was almost laughably simple: a small plastic stool designed to improve toilet posture and make bowel movements easier. Useful? For many people, yes. Exciting? Not exactly.
After all, it’s difficult to build a marketing campaign around the phrase, “Let’s talk about how you poop.”
That challenge could have killed the product.
Instead, it became the company’s greatest advantage.
Rather than treating the topic delicately, Squatty Potty went in the exact opposite direction. The company partnered with the Harmon Brothers agency and released a video featuring a medieval prince explaining bathroom posture while an animatronic unicorn produced rainbow-colored soft-serve ice cream.
Yes, really.
On paper, it sounds like the kind of idea that would get someone escorted out of a marketing meeting.
In reality, it became one of the most successful viral advertising campaigns ever created.
The video generated hundreds of millions of views, transformed a niche health product into a household name, and proved that people will absolutely watch a three-minute commercial about bowel movements if you make it entertaining enough.
More importantly, the laughs translated into sales. According to Adweek, the campaign increased online sales by 600% and boosted retail sales at Bed Bath & Beyond by 400%.
The genius of Squatty Potty wasn’t the stool.
It was recognizing that embarrassment was the opportunity.
The company took a topic people felt awkward discussing and used humor to make it approachable. Once people were laughing, they stopped feeling uncomfortable. Once they stopped feeling uncomfortable, they became willing to buy.
That’s the lesson for marketers.
If your product solves a problem people are embarrassed to admit they have, don’t run from the awkwardness.
Lean into it.
The thing your customers are reluctant to talk about may be the very thing that makes your marketing impossible to ignore.
Sometimes the biggest breakthrough isn’t solving a bigger problem.
It’s finding a more entertaining way to talk about it.
The Tortilla Blanket: How Becoming a Burrito Became a Business
Most successful products solve a problem.
The Tortilla Blanket solved a much more important challenge: How do you become a human burrito?
At its core, the product is simply a round fleece blanket printed to look like a giant tortilla. Functionally, it does exactly what every other blanket does. It keeps you warm while you watch television, scroll social media, or wonder where the last three hours disappeared.
The difference is that ordinary blankets don’t turn you into lunch.
That’s the joke.
And it worked.
The Tortilla Blanket accumulated tens of thousands of five-star reviews and became one of the internet’s favorite novelty gifts. People bought them for birthdays, holidays, college students, coworkers, and anyone with even a mild appreciation for absurdity.
What’s fascinating is that the product has virtually no functional advantage over a regular blanket. It isn’t warmer. It isn’t softer. It doesn’t contain revolutionary blanket technology developed in a secret laboratory.
It simply takes an ordinary product and gives it a ridiculous twist.
The genius of the Tortilla Blanket is that it combines three powerful marketing ingredients at once: it’s useful, it’s funny, and it’s instantly understandable. You don’t need a lengthy demonstration or a complicated sales pitch. One image does all the work. Someone wraps themselves up, instantly becomes a burrito, and the product is understood in less than a second.
Even better, customers become the marketing department.
Every time someone posts a photo of themselves wrapped up like a giant burrito, they’re creating an advertisement. The product isn’t just a blanket anymore. It’s a prop, a costume, a conversation starter, and a social media post waiting to happen.
That’s the lesson for marketers.
The best products don’t just get used.
They get shared.
A regular blanket keeps you warm. A tortilla blanket gives you a story, a laugh, and a photo your friends immediately understand.
And in the age of social media, that’s often worth more than an extra layer of fleece.
Tiny Plastic Babies: How a Party Favor Became a Long-Term Psychological Operation
While most products are designed to solve problems, tiny plastic babies create them.
At first glance, these miniature plastic figurines seem completely unremarkable. For years they’ve been sold as party favors, baby shower decorations, cake toppers, and novelty trinkets. They’re cheap, simple, and easy to ignore.
Then the internet found a better use for them.
The turning point came when an Amazon review went viral. One customer explained that she had purchased hundreds of tiny plastic babies for the sole purpose of hiding them around the house for her fiancé to discover over time. What began as a harmless joke slowly evolved into a months-long campaign of psychological warfare.
At first, her fiancé assumed there were only a handful of babies hidden around the house.
He was wrong.
Very wrong.
According to the review, finding baby after baby in increasingly unexpected places became a regular part of life. One memorable line explained that hearing his exhausted sigh followed by “oh my god” after discovering yet another plastic baby brought her endless joy.
The review spread across social media, blogs, and news sites because it transformed a forgettable party favor into something far more interesting: an endless prank.
What’s fascinating is that the product itself never changed.
The positioning did.
These weren’t tiny plastic toys anymore. They were now a prank kit, a running joke, and a source of stories people couldn’t wait to share with friends.
That’s a powerful lesson for marketers.
Sometimes customers discover a better use case than the company ever imagined. The viral review did more for tiny plastic babies than any carefully crafted advertising campaign could have done. It gave people a reason to buy them.
The real product wasn’t the plastic baby.
It was the reaction.
And that’s often where the biggest opportunities hide. The most successful products aren’t always the ones with the most features.
They’re the ones that create the best stories.
The Reload Koozie: How a Drink Holder Became a Viral Business
Drink holders are so boring they don’t even get invited to conversations about boring products.
Which is why the Reload Koozie is so fascinating.
Created by a college student, the product is essentially a standard koozie with a rubber grip on the bottom. The innovation itself wasn’t particularly groundbreaking. The magic happened when he demonstrated it.
After finishing a soda, he slammed a fresh can into the empty one. The empty can shot away while the new one instantly snapped into place.
It looked less like grabbing another drink and more like reloading an action movie prop.
The video exploded.
One clip reportedly generated more than 50 million views, and demand surged so quickly that the creator was running dozens of 3D printers around the clock. According to interviews, the business generated roughly $300,000 in sales during a single month.
Not bad for a product nobody was asking for.
That’s because the Reload Koozie doesn’t really solve a major problem. Humanity had already mastered the difficult challenge of drinking two sodas in a row. The appeal wasn’t utility.
It was the moment.
People saw the video and immediately fell into one of two camps. They either thought it was the dumbest thing they’d ever seen, or they wanted one immediately so they could show it to their friends.
That’s often the sign of a great viral product.
What’s especially interesting is that the Reload Koozie performs the exact same function as thousands of other drink holders. It still holds a can. It still keeps your hands dry.
But what changed was the story.
A normal koozie holds.
This one reloads.
That single word transformed an ordinary product into a shareable experience.
For marketers, that’s the real lesson. Sometimes innovation isn’t about changing the product.
It’s about changing the verb attached to it.
Don’t store—deploy.
Don’t organize—command.
Don’t hold—reload.
The product may stay exactly the same, but the story suddenly becomes a lot more interesting.
The Chia Pet: A Half-Billion-Dollar Business Built on Growing Hair on Clay Animals
While some products solve important problems, the Chia Pet grows grass hair on a ceramic sheep.
And somehow that has generated more than $500 million in sales.
If you’ve somehow missed this cultural phenomenon, a Chia Pet is a simple terracotta figure coated with chia seeds. Add water, wait a few days, and green sprouts begin growing from its head, back, or wherever the designer decided a ridiculous hairstyle should appear.
That’s it.
No app.
No AI.
No subscription plan.
Just agriculture and comedy working together in perfect harmony.
The product exploded in popularity during the 1980s, helped enormously by the unforgettable “Ch-Ch-Ch-Chia” jingle. Decades later, millions of people can still sing it on command, which is probably more than can be said for most products launched in the last ten years.
What’s remarkable is how little the concept has changed. The company regularly releases new versions featuring celebrities, politicians, and pop-culture characters, but the core experience remains exactly the same: grow absurd green hair on something that wasn’t supposed to have hair.
The lesson for marketers is fascinating.
Most businesses live in constant fear of competitors creating something cheaper, faster, smarter, or better.
The Chia Pet largely avoids that problem.
There isn’t really a “better” Chia Pet.
You either want a ceramic animal with a green afro growing out of its head, or you don’t.
That’s an unusually powerful position to occupy.
The company isn’t competing on features or performance. It exists in its own quirky category where comparison is almost impossible.
And that’s the real takeaway.
The strongest businesses aren’t always the ones with the best products.
Sometimes they’re the ones that create a category so unique that nobody else even thinks to compete.
After all, how do you improve a Chia Pet?
That’s the beauty of it.
You don’t.
Doggles: The Multi-Million-Dollar Business of Putting Sunglasses on Dogs
Most product ideas begin with a serious question.
Doggles began with a dog squinting.
In the late 1990s, entrepreneur Ronnie Dulu noticed her dog struggling in bright sunlight and wondered whether dogs might benefit from eye protection. That simple observation led to Doggles, protective eyewear designed specifically for dogs.
At first glance, the idea sounds ridiculous.
Dog sunglasses?
Really?
Yet Doggles grew into a multi-million-dollar business, and the reason has less to do with dogs than with the people who love them.
To be fair, the product has legitimate uses. Dogs with certain eye conditions can benefit from protection against UV light, wind, dust, and debris. Service dogs and veterinary patients sometimes wear protective eyewear for practical reasons.
But let’s be honest: that’s not why most customers buy them.
Most people aren’t researching canine eye health. They’re looking at a Labrador wearing aviator sunglasses and imagining how adorable their own dog would look.
The genius of Doggles is understanding who the real customer is. The dog wears the product, but the human makes the purchase. And pet owners routinely spend money on their animals that they would never spend on themselves. Once you’re already buying premium treats, orthopedic beds, birthday cakes, and holiday outfits, dog sunglasses don’t seem particularly outrageous.
The lesson for marketers is simple: Customers aren’t always buying utility.
Sometimes they’re buying a feeling.
In this case, it’s affection, amusement, and the irresistible urge to take a photo that makes everyone smile.
The competition isn’t really other dog sunglasses.
It’s the absence of a picture that hasn’t been taken yet.
And that’s a surprisingly valuable thing to sell.
The 10 Opportunity Patterns Hidden Inside These Products
By now you’ve probably noticed something interesting.
None of these products became successful for the same reason.
The Yodeling Pickle didn’t win because it solved a painful problem. DUDE Wipes didn’t win because it invented a new technology. Liquid Death didn’t win because it discovered a superior source of water. And Doggles certainly didn’t become a multi-million-dollar business because dogs suddenly demanded designer eyewear.
On the surface, these products look completely unrelated.
Underneath, they’re built on a surprisingly small number of repeatable patterns.
That’s important because you don’t need to copy these products. In fact, you probably shouldn’t. The real opportunity is understanding the pattern behind the product and applying it somewhere else.
Here Are the Ten Patterns We Uncovered:
- The Conversation Starter
Products that create reactions, laughter, confusion, or surprise often spread more easily than products that merely solve problems. - The Identity Switch
Take a commodity and attach it to a specific tribe, identity, or self-image. - The Opposite Position
When everyone in a category looks the same, win by becoming the exact opposite of what customers expect. - The Visual Transformation
Products that create dramatic before-and-after moments often market themselves. - Turn Embarrassment Into Entertainment
The topics people are uncomfortable discussing often contain the strongest marketing opportunities. - The Human Costume
People love products that temporarily transform them into something else. - The Experience Product
Sometimes the product is merely a prop that creates an ongoing story. - The Dramatic Verb
Changing the verb can completely change how people perceive the product. - Uncopyable Strangeness
The stranger and more specific the category, the harder it becomes for competitors to attack it. - Sell to the Buyer, Not the User
The person using the product and the person paying for it often have completely different motivations.
These patterns show up far more often than you might think.
Once you learn to recognize them, you’ll start seeing them everywhere.
You’ll notice them in products on Amazon. In Kickstarter campaigns. In TikTok videos. In local businesses. In hobbies. In memberships. In ordinary products sitting on store shelves.
That’s when something interesting happens.
You stop looking at products the way most people do.
Instead of seeing what a product is, you start seeing why it works.
- The Yodeling Pickle stops being a novelty toy and becomes a Conversation Starter.
- Liquid Death stops being bottled water and becomes an Opposite Position.
- The Tortilla Blanket stops being a blanket and becomes a Human Costume.
And once you can see the pattern, you can start applying it somewhere else.
That’s the real opportunity.
Because the goal isn’t to create another Yodeling Pickle.
The goal is to discover the next opportunity everyone else overlooks.
Part One showed you the results.
In Part Two, you’ll discover the process:
We’ll break down these ten patterns, examine the mechanics behind them, and turn them into a practical system for generating ideas.
You’ll learn how to find overlooked niches, transform ordinary products into remarkable ones, uncover hidden customer identities, and deliberately create opportunities instead of waiting for inspiration to strike.
Then, in Part Three, we’ll put that system to work with 50 more real-world examples spanning products, services, memberships, software, coaching programs, digital products, and overlooked markets. You’ll learn how to recognize profitable patterns, adapt them to your own ideas, and spot opportunities that most people never notice.
Because by the end of this series, you won’t just have a list of unusual products.
You’ll have a completely different way of looking at business opportunities.
And once you develop that skill, you’ll start finding possibilities in places other people walk past every day.
