Money Can't Buy Me Intro

| tech | sales | startups |

We know that money cant buy you love, but could it buy you a warm intro for sales?

I saw PartnerHQ launch on YC today. The idea makes sense, but feels like its doomed from the start because it relies on people being willing to burn their network for a quick buck.

I’ve seen a few versions of this type of marketplace in the past but have not seen any success. The most recent version that I explored was from a company that made a network that you could use to get warm intros to people who agreed to take calls with vendors in exchange for donating to a charity. This seems a bit more subtle than simply getting a slice of the commission, but the idea still fell apart in practice. I looked at their customer testimonials page and happened to know a couple of the companies that they listed as happy clients. When I reached out to get a back channel reference from those happy clients I either got “I’ve never heard of this company” or “They gave me a ton of useless leads”.

It feels like the timeshare incentive problem. Every cartoon has an episode where the main character goes to Aspen for a free ski trip and has to sit through hours of high pressure sales meetings in exchange. If you give away something in exchange for a meeting, then smart people will take the meeting with no intention to buy just to get some of whatever you are offering.

The warm part of a warm intro is based on trust. I can’t think of a faster way to lose any trust I have with someone than by shilling some random product to them. Especially, if I don’t disclose that I am being paid for the introduction. If I do, I am not sure how effective the intro would be, if I don’t and the person finds out later, I will have burned a relationship for a couple hundred bucks. Doesn’t seem worth it to me.

Of course, I could be completely wrong. I look forward to revisiting this in the future to see how it goes.

Thank you for reading! Share your thoughts with me on bluesky, mastodon, or via email.

Check out some more stuff to read down below.

Most popular posts this month

Recent Favorite Blog Posts

This is a collection of the last 8 posts that I bookmarked.

Articles from blogs I follow around the net

A Borges story about a guy who gets AI to summarize all the world’s information for him, and then summarize the summary, until the AI has the whole world summarized into a single word. He sits alone at his desk, staring at the word, repeating it endlessly, certain he is experiencing everything

[email protected]/Bluesky

via Manual do Usuário July 15, 2025

Arcadia Finance exploited for $3.5 million

The Arcadia Finance defi margin protocol was exploited for $3.5 million after an attacker found a vulnerability in a project smart contract. The attacker quickly swapped the stolen tokens and bridged them from Base to the Ethereum ma…

via Web3 is Going Just Great July 15, 2025

Back to the Future

This past weekend, I decided to take a trip down memory lane and take a look at the evolution of this blog’s design over the years (with a little help from the Wayback Machine). While I’ve really enjoyed the challenge of making an obsessively backwards co…

via flower.codes July 15, 2025

Generated by openring