#getsimplist.com

Pretty cool, simple tool for starting to think about how much money your business needs before you're ready to buy that yacht...or at the very least be break-even. http://growth.tlb.org/

Does your business have a sworn enemy? I don’t mean a frenemy whom you openly work with until that hopeful day when you can crush them. Not the people who kind of annoy you. I mean the businesses and people with values that are antithetical to the core mission of your team. I mean the entities that offend you with their very existence. In the immortal words of the Notorious B.I.G…the folks you have beef with.

A sworn enemy provides a foil. A true south to your true north. A dragon to wake up and slay every single day for your users, customers and for the world. As Josh Linkner wrote in Forbes, you’ve got to pick a fight to build something that really matters.

Your sworn enemy might be mediocrity in a market. It might be bad, ugly design in Enterprise software (shout to FieldLens). It might be inefficiencies in supply chain, or poorly managed retail operations that lead to higher prices for end consumers (looking at you Jeff Bezos). It could be mercilessly attacking the stuffy whiteshirt and propriety of old school Valley VCs with passion-filled expletives and non-traditional money-ball strategies (hell yeah Dave McClure!)

Our team’s sworn enemy: the mediocre introduction middleman. You know that guy who offered to introduce you to some Angel Investors if you pay him to play? Yeah, him. You know that recruiter who keeps calling you with candidates half of whom it turns out you share connections with (and the other half of whom aren’t a good fit because that recruiter doesn’t know you or your team well)? And for the basement bargain price of only $10,000-$20,000? Definitely him.

It’s not that there aren’t amazing recruiters and incredible advisors that you’d be lucky to work with. It’s that mediocre middlemen have built an industry around your fear that you can’t get to the right people for your business to succeed. That’s bull.

I get higher quality intros and candidates than 99% of the crap that cold calling middlemen lay on my doorstep; simply by combining the power of my team’s networks

So we’re putting you on notice mediocre introduction middlemen: step up your game. Empower your clients. Collaborate with them on identifying who they already know so you can go find the leads they TRULY can’t get to. Your target clients are the people that are increasingly using Simplist to turn every team member, advisor and investor into a connector across every single one of their combined networks (linkedin, twitter, facebook, their contacts, and we’ve got more coming!)

A small, scrappy team can do all of the following without paying a middle man if they know how to leverage their networks:

Get to their first 2,000  users

Raise their first round of funding ($100K - $1MM)

Close their first 5-10 business customers ($100K - $1MM in rev)

Recruit their first 5-7 employees (~$150K in savings)

Yeah. We’re gunning for all mediocre middlemen (and mediocre middlewomen), especially the ones who prey on early stage founders and small teams. That’s beef.

What if you needed to ask Entrepreneurs (lots of them) what they thought about yout founder-focused product? What if you needed to ask a bunch of CMOs about how they make tech investments to validate purchasing decisions? ronjdub shares how he turns his network connections into really smart outreach. FAST.

What if you're recruiting like this guy and want your network to make targeted suggestions easily?

I could use help with my ** list http://t.co/EnQaUr7R3G via @getSimplist

— sonny caberwal (@caberwal) May 21, 2014

It might be time for you to get your network working.