The $100 must have been spent on phone calls to all the potential clients he asked to tell him why he should not proceed with his ideas. From reading the article, it sounds like this pre-company, ground-pounding, customer-finding is more like finding suckers who would be willing to pay him for his new product/service.

The amazing thing is the POPin product/service he is now selling to large corporations. From what I can tell, it's just software that lets people take surveys and vote on polls so the higher-ups can find out what other people in the company (and supposedly customers) think. Of course, there are mobile apps for it, so it's trendy.

What does it do? It "generates buy-in," and "leverages knowledge" in a "fun and interactive" way to "derive tangible business results." You know the "buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo" thing, where it's a valid sentence using the same word to mean 7 different things? You clearly could do the same thing with "buzzword."

"Buzzword buzzword buzzword buzzword buzzword buzzword buzzword." And these millionaire corporate execs drink it up and hand over their money! For something they could do already, with existing software, existing employees (who are already paid to do this stuff), and people throughout the chain who should already be communicating back and forth, up and down.

It really makes one wonder if they're all just college frat buddies who, being so insulated from their companies' actual work, budgets, and successes or failures, readily agree to scratch each others' backs at the opportune times. "Oh hey, man, you got a new company selling a new mobile survey app we can use to poll our employees? Well, we could do that already for free, and that's what our managers and VPs are supposed to be doing already--but sure, here's $500,000 for one of your sessions. By the way, aren't you still on the board of the last company you founded? Would that company be interested in buying some XYZ from us? Great, that's what I thought. Good deal."

Their app doesn't do anything new or unique. Anyone could set up a web forum, a wiki, a bunch of online polls--for free. Managers should already be talking to their employees and communicating up and down the chain. Instead of just doing that, they pay this other company big bucks to use their mobile app to do it for them.

And then, after getting a few bigcorps to pay them, they put those bigcorps' logos on their web site, and write an "article" for an entrepreneur magazine, supposedly revealing some business wisdom. Then they link to those articles on their own web site, showing how smart and published their founders are. Then I suppose that sets them up to sell to the next level of suckers, the ones who wouldn't buy in at first.

I can't help but think that it's just like the old Scrooge McDuck comic, "Scrooge's Plain Old Soap." Donald starts his own soap company and sells the same soap in fancy packaging for more money--but it's still just soap. And that's all these guys are doing: repackaging existing stuff and selling it to the execs who have the corporate budgets to burn. Then those execs can point to how they "leveraged knowledge" and "derived tangible business results," and they can then "pivot" those "successes" into their next, higher-paying job.

All of this is not technology--it's salesmanship. He talks about finding "truth" and "value"--but the truth is that he's providing very little added value, merely acting as a middleman repackaging what already exists, then finding people willing to pay extra for it. Barnum covered that a long time ago. Still works, and I guess it always will. But with tech and the Internet, you'd think it'd be harder to get away with that.

Makes one wonder, who are the real suckers? The people buying that stuff? Or the ones not selling it?