💰  Cash for connections

👋  Good morning. If your childhood included ripping open a can of frozen OJ for a slushy treat, we have some bad news. After 80 years in the freezer aisle, Minute Maid is discontinuing its frozen juice concentrate in the US and Canada. If you’re one of the mourning fans looking for one last taste of 1946, you’ve got until spring.

STARTING UP

Can lentils level up?

❌  The problem: Lentils are nutritious and sustainable, but they’re not the sexiest snack.

💡  The pitch: Lentil Telepathy makes shelf-stable snacks using whole lentils — not ground into flour or made into chips. The startup sells lentil snacks, a whole-lentil cereal, and lentil toppers, all designed to be eaten straight from the bag (a bag that the founders hope will one day be made from post-consumer recycled material).

🚀  The outlook: Currently self-funded, Lentil Telepathy sells D2C on Amazon and through its own site with hopes of making lentils cool again.

NEWS FLASH

• Startup Sapiom is developing a tool that would let vibe-coded AI agents autonomously buy the external services they need, which would be charged as pass-through fees by vibe-coding platforms, per TechCrunch. For example, an app that incorporates SMS would automatically sign up for Twilio.
  

• Scan your face for entry? TruCrowd, a Prague-based startup that offers biometric ticketing for live events, is partnering with ticketing tech company Nuweb Group to launch in more venues.
  

• More video game TV: Craig Mazin, co-creator of TV adaptation "The Last of Us," is helming an HBO series that takes place after the events of “Baldur’s Gate 3,” Larian Studios’ hit video game that helped further push “Dungeons & Dragons” into the mainstream. Mazin's a fan, BTW. He put nearly 1k hours into the game.
  

• The US CIA will stop publishing The World Factbook, a reference text full of facts about other countries, though the agency did not explain why. It’s been published since 1962, though it was classified until 1971.

SUPER BOWL WINS

How top brands dominate the Big Game

The championship is bigger than football, friendship, and dad’s eccentric snacks. When 127m+ viewers tune in to anything, it’s about the ads.

And not just TV spots, which see 4x less spending than digital these days anyway. Our Big Game Branding Report distills 300k customer data points into signals and high-growth tactics, like:  

• Roughly 40% of marketers advertise around the Big Game, and 46% report higher ROI than other investments.  
• Traditionally, email engagement rises + ad performance dips during championship week.
• 56% of successful game-day marketers plan their moves 3+ months in advance. 

Find out what flies, what flops, and market trends the experts are aware of. 

THE BIG IDEA

Know a lot of people? Turn it into a side hustle
For some people, networking comes naturally — and they’re the ones everyone turns to when they need an intro or a recommendation. 

Joe Mindak is one of those people, but he thinks his network is worth something. He wrote a book titled Connectors Get Paid: Build a Referral Network That Pays, and co-founded Nolodex, a software platform that facilitates cash for connections.
How it works

The Nolodex platform hosts individual communities. Community owners pay a $129/month fee to license the software, but determine their own membership rules, fees, and commission structures. For example, some are invite-only, while others may accept only alumni of a particular university. 

• Members can refer each other to their contacts both inside and outside of the community. If a business deal is reached, referrers receive a cut. If there’s no deal, there’s no payout.
  
• Nolodex tracks every referral, establishing a paper trail showing who introduced whom, whether a deal was made, what it was worth, what it paid out, and other details. 

Who it benefits
Many community owners are already networking groups — chambers of commerce, fraternal organizations, etc. They can choose to receive a percentage of members’ commissions.
Well-connected members get paid, of course, while small businesses that lack a sales force — and introverted or less-connected members — benefit from their recommendations.
Mindak describes it as a flywheel where people continue to refer their connections who do good work.
“You’re not introducing someone just because you want to get paid. It’s your reputation on the line. If I introduce you to somebody and you do a bad job, that’s on me,” Mindak told The Hustle. 

Mindak’s own community has grown to 550 members with 4.3k active deals, while another 600 are in play across the other ~30 communities on the platform.
It’s an especially interesting model…

… at a time when LinkedIn and other platforms are flooded with AI and you’re never quite sure if you’re talking to a bot, but Mindak said Nolodex is all about “going old school,” making introductions, and building relationships.
In fact, he’s about to close his biggest deal yet… thanks to a guy he met at the YMCA. 

🔗

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Smell that? It’s the hidden ways businesses use scent marketing to keep you coming back.

NEWSWORTHY NUMBER

Share of kindergarten-age kids who — forget reading — don’t know how to use a book, according to a survey by UK-based Kindred Squared, which wasn’t a skill we knew needed to be taught. Teachers reported that some tykes have even tried to swipe or tap the pages like a phone (um…), so we suppose it comes as no surprise that 25%+ are struggling with other basic life skills, like eating, drinking, and using the toilet independently. 

Gen Z might suck at workplace etiquette, but Gen Alpha… those kids might actually be cooked.

AROUND THE WEB

📅  On this day: In 1942, daylight saving time — then called “war time” — began in the US. Its origins date back to WWI, when it was installed as a way to conserve fuel.  

🐦  That’s interesting: The history of “Flappy Bird.” 

🌿  That’s cool: A map of Spain’s flora and fauna. 

📰  Newsletter: Join Future Tools for the biggest AI stories and the most interesting tools.

😴  Aww: May we all sleep this well.

SHOWER THOUGHT

If your first-ever attempt at gambling went completely unsuccessfully, that was probably the better outcome. SOURCE

Today's email was brought to you by Juliet Bennett Rylah and Singdhi Sokpo.
Editing by: Sara "It's who you know" Friedman.

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