I do B2B sales (specifically, customer support for consumer-facing businesses), and I'd pay ~$1,000/mo for a service that solves this problem:
Which warm intros should I ask for? There are ~1,000 companies in my ideal customer profile. I've got ~500 friends who I'd feel comfortable asking for warm intros, and say these friends each have ~500 friends. After deduplicating, that's ~100,000 second-degree connections, some of whom are decision-makers at companies I'd like to sell to.
I'd want someone to go through my LinkedIn/Facebook/Instagram/Twitter/etc., and tell me something along the lines of: "Ben might know decision-makers at Companies A, B, C, D, and E." And, conversely, I'd like to know all the possible warm introductions that could lead me to Company A (e.g. "Ben, Max, and Jennifer could possibly introduce you to Alice, Bob, and Cameron at Company A").
All of this information is available to me; it's just a total O(N^2) pain to clean and aggregate it. Like, I can certainly spend an hour listening to podcasts and looking through Ben's LinkedIn connections, Facebook friends, Instagram followers - and seeing if any of them are COOs at CPG brands. But I'll run out of podcasts eventually, and then it's not a very high-leverage use of my time to repeat that process for Max, Jennifer, Nate, Christy, et al.
We built intrologic.com to do exactly that. Started like a side project to try to sell our previous product (a sales chatbot) but then took off on its own. Connect your networks and your friends and then you search for warm intros. It's free (we plan to make money only when an intro is made). You can sign-up at https://intrologic.com/start. I am the founder.
I think he's talking about the Blackfish-style, Greenpeace-ier environmental stuff.
My dad's in the environmental field too, and that sounds about right. He spent about 20 years working as a jack-of-all-trades-CTO-type guy for a Western Widget Company, made a six figure salary, and was home every day by 5 PM. I know a lot of my friends' finance-sector parents didn't get to spend nearly as much time with their kids. There's a lot of very good advice in this article.
Some criticism: I don't really like the buttons style, but more objectively, you should center text and take a look at their size, it made me super uncomfortable when I opened the page. Also, the "Try us for a week" at the bottom is shifting the page in the background to the left, leaving 20px of white space or so in the right side (Windows, Google Chrome). The "Start Trial" button that appears after clicking on "Try us for a week" looks much better.
"But I guarantee you there's zero programmers waiting around, saying to themselves, 'If only I had a visionary come along to give me an idea'"
My co-founder and I are both technical. For the first year of our company - as we built and sold things - we were constantly thinking "damn, life would sure be a lot easier if we had a killer idea. We would pay millions for an idea that we could execute on."
It's super important. Everyone has ideas, but most ideas are frankly not that great. Our ideas certainly weren't.
Then we found a better idea, got some traction, etc. Life's good. But if great ideas truly were a dime a dozen, we would've had much more fun in 2016 :)
Furthermore, if you take on a co-founder, here's what you get: one founder can focus on building the product, while the other founder focuses on figuring out what variation of the product is most needed by the outside world. It is very difficult for one person to do both. These require two fairly different skillsets, and both benefit from having technical experience - the former for obvious reasons; the latter because it's much easier to know what's buildable if you've built stuff before.
"Great" ideas are a dime a dozen, at least on paper. No one can do anything about the standards you and your co-founder set for yourself, but there is an abundance of opportunity out there. Almost any source of annoyance can be parlayed into a useful product.
I say "on paper" because no idea is worth anything until it is at least partially implemented, and no concept remains static throughout the implementation process.
And let me further clarify that you don't even need an original idea. Most successful companies are entirely non-groundbreaking, perhaps even blase. Breaking ground is expensive, financially and psychologically. Let someone else break ground and not only will the path already be blazed, but you'll have the record of their experience to inform your choices, and you'll know the pain points that people have with them. (The upside is, any given project is probably far less groundbreaking than it imagines, especially in the kool-aid drenched environs of Silicon Valley).
Think early search engines, many of which leverage or improve upon phonebook-style directories, and Google -- Google came later, and as such, knew that they needed something better than AltaVista et al could offer. Early social networks and Facebook, etc. The list goes on.
In a judgment free way - my dad's long-term business partner was overweight. Died super young, in his mid-60s. It was heartbreaking for everyone involved, and I would not wish it upon anyone. Please take good care of yourself.
Yeah, and I've been seeing bulgogi marinade in mainstream Bay Area supermarkets. I use it for everything. Which reminds me that I need to call my grandparents...
