One more interesting one is a guy who had a company in china make free samples of 10 types of products. He put them all on amazon forsale and one of them took off so he made more of that one. His net profit is around 300K/year after just one year.
Another one uses prison labor to manufacture electronic components. The recidivism rate among the inmates who go through the program is much lower than the average. Other industries include:
pet products, doggie day care, health insurance, HR consulting, hair salon, convenience store, restaurants etc. Most of them were never in tech, but some were and just wanted something more traditional. For example, the hair salon netted about 50K/year. One wouldnt make a living but 5 or 6 would.
Flyers were sent "to the parents of" over 15,000 incoming freshmen students for several universities in the southwest. We had one order.
Not one percent. Just one.
Market research might have told us that we might have been able to launch such a thing in NYC, but perhaps that in the southwest, people like shopping for their kids.
I don't see my entrepreneurship activities as tech or non-tech. They're all curiosity and problem-solving.
I was doing something I deeply enjoyed and forged a new friendships, partnerships, and learned about price arbitrage and the timing of the comic book markets.
I didn't realize at the time, but I had incredibly low startup costs and did it for about a year. Paid for my hobby of comic books at the time and made a hefty $10,000 profit.
I didn't really "choose" tech entrepreneurship, I just fell into it after applying for Extreme University and got in (think Y-Combinator in Toronto, Canada)
I'm working on a photo scanning business now, similar to the first, customers mail the photos to my address in US, UK. It get dispatch to my team in another country. They scan it to DVD and mail it back to my customer.
It's not something I'd want to scale, I prefer web dev for the majority of my time - but now I get paid to exercise, instead of paying someone else. And I've gotten to meet a LOT of new people - people I can market my startup to, and bounce feedback off of.
