Creating 10,000 jobs

Discussions
#1

Hey guys just wrote this post:

Would love to hear any thoughts or feedback.

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I’ve been asking myself a lot of those bigger questions the last several months.

What am I here on this planet for? What if I didn’t need any money? What can I do to make this world a better place?

One of the things that I keep coming back to is that I’d love to help people make a living. So many people in the country are struggling to make ends meet. The economy is doing terribly in many places, but the eCommerce industry is thriving.

What if I could recruit people from underprivileged backgrounds (inner city youth, single moms, people in developing countries, etc.) to get a job in eCommerce?

What if I could help 10,000 people get a good job?

I think that would be pretty awesome.

10,000 is just an arbitrarily and audaciously high number to reach for. I’d be pumped to be able to create 10 jobs. But this gives me something bigger than myself to shoot for.

I’m not exactly sure what it’s going to look like, but I’m looking into identifying a niche service in the eCommerce industry that I can offer.

I want to offer a super high quality niche service, while also providing top notch training to smart, motivated people who otherwise might not have awesome job prospects.

As they say over at Andela:

Genius is evenly distributed; opportunity is not

Andela is an amazing company and part of the inspiration for this idea. They recruit people out of Lagos, Nigeria and train them as software devs.

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Not exactly sure which niche service I’m targeting, but few options I’m looking at:

Customer service
Content marketing / link building / link auditing
Product listing
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I’m going to be podcasting my progress. If you have any thoughts or feedback, let me know!

#2

I have also been thinking a bit about philanthropy. My wife and I have recently committed to paying for an Indian woman from a poor background to train as a skilled seamstress. I figure my money can do a lot more good in the third world than it can in the developed world. But I can also see the merit of your approach. I’m sure there are smart people out there who could thrive with a bit of training and guidance. But how are you going to find these people?

#3

BTW I think AdWords account account management is an area where a smart and motivated person could make a nice living for themself with a laptop and few weeks of preparation and training.

#4

That’s awesome man!!! I love it! I was thinking about whether to tackle the demand side or supply side first. I think I’m going to tackle the demand side first. I have to actually figure out which niche I’m going to go after, and then actually learn the business to a certain extent, and figure out how to sell it to merchants.

I have a feeling that once I’ve done that and once I have live jobs to hire people for, it probably won’t be too hard to find people. I can post something up on craigslist and get a ton of responses I’m sure.

The tricky part will be vetting them and deciding on what the criteria is to enter the program. For example let’s say I land on the idea of recruiting inner city youth. Well if I get an application from someone that doesn’t happen to be inner city youth but would be a great fit and the hourly rate is a good fit for them, I probably wouldn’t want to turn them down.

I think long term once I have the demand side worked out, I would want to begin developing relationships in specific communities and building rapport with them. Maybe even have an office / workspace in that community where people can work out of.

Interesting note re: adwords. It’s probably about on par with link building stuff I’d imagine as far as the level of value. I’d actually think it’s probably even harder, as ppc has continued to get super sophisticated over the years.

But yeah I can totally imagine that if you took someone that was smart and motivated and gave them some great training in ppc alongside some real world experience and a good mentor, they could get up to speed really quickly.

Link building / digital pr