Andy Richardson: Shhh, it's a secret! Big ideas to make big bucks

They serve ants. Ants? Can you imagine. We couldn't.

Margaret leant in: "Can I show you a video?"

I imagined what it would be and told her I wasn't that sort of man.

She kicked me in the shins and told me she wasn't that sort of woman.

She wanted to talk about balls. And eggs. And the way they were a match made in heaven.

"Are you sure it's not that sort of video?" I asked.

She kicked me again. I got the message. It wasn't.

The eggs in question were of the Kinder variety. And the balls were tiny plastic tubes that lay inside and housed a toy.

Margaret sat back and press play. "Watch this."

My eyes glazed over as a woman sat in front of a table lined with Kinder Eggs – not the chocolate, just the plastic tubes. Her hands moved slowly towards the tube, removed the tops, then took out a small toy car. And then they moved to the next tube, removed the top and took out a small soldier.

I assumed it was a joke. "Let's get back to the lamb."

But Margaret hadn't finished.

"Look at the figures," she said, conspiratorially. "Twelve million people have watched that woman's hands take toys out of plastic tubes." She was right. Other videos were even more popular. They'd been watched 35 million times.

And that led Margaret to her BIG IDEA.

"You're good with a camera," she said. I faked modesty.

"So, what I was thinking. . ."

Margaret wanted me to spend £100 on Kinder Eggs so she could open them in front of a camera and her prettily manicured nails could be watched by 35,000,000 people.

I interjected. "But Margaret, why?" Have you got a hand fetish? Are you too shy to show your face? And, more importantly, can we eat the chocolate that the plastic tubes are wrapped in?

Margaret knew I wasn't taking her seriously.

"No," she said. "The video has to be of my hands unwrapping the egg, taking the foil away, then opening the shell to remove the tube."

She had it all planned out, like burglars at a jewellery heist.

We'd been talking about more interesting things, or so I thought. We'd been discussing books that we might write, publish and turn into megatron best-sellers. But Margaret thought that was boring. She thought our future lay in videos of plastic eggs. "Thirty five million people – if you get advertisers paying £0.01 every time someone watched it, we'd make £350,000."

Brilliant. Then we could buy the restaurant, rather than eat in it.

I have another friend. He's one of the cleverest people in Britain. He runs a team of 800 people, secured a blindingly good degree from a blindingly good university and advises ministers when they need to know what to do next.

And his BIG IDEA is this: chips.

He wants to leave behind the big car, the fat salary, the team of 800 workers and open a chip shop. "The figures are unbelievable," he tells me. "If you ran three chip shops you could retire to Mauritius and live off the profits."

Who'd have thought it. Chip and fry a few King Edwards and you can live like King Edward. My friend wasn't done. He wanted to win a Michelin star for his he'll-never-buy-it-because-it's-a-mad-idea chip shop.

"There's a hawker stall in Singapore that's won a Michelin star," he told me.

He was right. For less than £3, diners can buy food from a hawker who has achieved the same coveted status as Gordon Ramsay, Marcus Wareing and Heston Blumenthal. "So, I was thinking, what I could do was buy a chip shop, earn it a star, then sell up and fly off."

I told Margaret his story. She harrummpphhhhed.

"God," she said. "There are times when I don't think you take me seriously. There are times when I think you wouldn't know a good idea if it bit you on the…"

The waiter interrupted. "More drinks?"

Margaret showed me another video. It was of four small plastic toys and the disembodied woman was moving them to and fro, as though they were walking to work.

"It's the future," she promised me. "If we buy a few Kinder Eggs, we could make one of these tomorrow. They even do them with sweets: they just open the packet and drop them on the table."

"What, just open the packet and drop them?"

"Precisely."

Wow.

Margaret had almost won me round. "So do you fancy it?" she said.

I nodded.

"Cool," she said. "But you must promise me one thing."

"What?" I asked.

"You must promise not to tell anybody else about it, in case they copy our idea."

"Don't worry, I told Margaret. I won't tell a soul."