Garth's World

Jigsaw Connect for Cash

Want to make $200 the easy way? (No, this does not involve dressing up like Little Bo Peep or anything medical…) All you have to do is pay attention to what your customers say after you get your sale (I know it’s hard) and relay that information to Jigsaw. Then we translate your info into something useful, like an introduction or lead, then you “pass go” and we send you the Two Hundo. It’s a midnight run.

Al Gore via last.fm

This idea is not original to Jigsaw. Even before Al Gore invented the Internet, enterprising sales guys realized that they had access to buying information from individuals that didn’t necessarily relate to their own company’s products or services. They passed on the “lead” to a company that could provide that service and pocketed a commission or finder’s fee for making that connection. There have been a ton of companies recently that have tried to make this concept work online, but have failed to get any traction because:

1. No scale - not enough salespeople know about it
2. Complicated process - salespeople hate extra work
3. No core business- a referral network alone don’t pay the bills

Witness Jigsaw Connect. Working together with Myndnet, Jigsaw now has a place on our site where you (Joe Salesguy-Jigsaw Member) can fill out a form with qualifying information on a specific company. Advertisers (e.g. Gartner, NetApp, AboveNet, Aruba, SkillSoft, Rohati, Altera, VMware, Adify, Egencia) have all signed on with Jigsaw to accept leads from any of our 850,000 registered members and pay them $200 per lead. There’s plenty of scale, it’s easy, and if it falls flat then Jigsaw keeps running as a profitable data company and I have another failed Community idea to reference when trying to shoot down Fowler’s latest brain fart.

Greetuns from N’awlins!

Image by Ken Lund via Flickr

I’m here for the umpteenth annual Microsoft World Partner Conference in New Orleans, and happy to report that despite the recent economic and hurricane disasters this place still ROCKS. My designated handlers just dropped me off from my second trip “Uptown,” the neighborhood around Tulane University beyond the limit of where all the corporate-golf-shirt-with-dress-shoes crowd hangs out, where every night is Mardi Gras, everyone is biracial, and there is a fat black guy playing the tuba within earshot at all times. San Francisco, New York, Chicago, Vegas: you ain’t got nothing on this town! As soon as I engage all my patented hangover cures I need to get back to the Convention Center to earn my keep, but first I wanted to check with my favorite group of internet tools...