1428 Ad Seeds

I respect people that get out there with new ideas. It’s too easy to copy old ones, and borrow someone else’s hard-earned creativity. But seeing a new opportunity where none did before, that’s a quiet form of genius.
Like the guy who first realized he could mix horse poop with sawdust and sell it to someone else as fertilizer. He turned a problem into a product. I guess you could say, since he came up with a new business fertilizer idea, he wasn’t an entrepreneur so much as an entremanure.
Speaking of growing mediums, I got this interesting letter from Google the other day. That’s right, a real letter, made of paper, through the US Mail, from the giant of e-commerce, Google. I guess even they realize it’s hard to get attention on the internet these days.
They were trying to get me to advertise on Google AdSense. To, you know, get noticed on the internet. There was a certain inherent irony involved. Like bus-boards telling you to advertise in the newspaper.
But the most interesting thing about the letter was what the actual letter was made of. The paper was beige and kind of speckled. It was uniform thinness. But the last line of printing on it said, “PS: This card was printed on 100% recycled paper embedded with wildflower seeds. Plant it in a sunny spot with a thin layer of soil, add water, and watch it grow—while you watch your business grow with AdWords.”
Clever. Does it work? You’ll never really know. If you put a bare patch of soil outside and watered it, how long would it take before just the air blew in some wildflower seeds?
And by wildflower I mean weeds.
By the way, I hear bull poop makes great manure.
America, ya gotta love it.