I have a dream.
I've held it since about age 24. Now I'm in my 29th year (turning 29 on my New Year birthday), so roughly five years.
I wanted to make that dream come true someday, but I hadn't moved toward it at all.
About half a year ago I decided maybe I should throw away my current environment and start from zero somewhere I could train toward that dream.
Like: you want to become a film director, so you dive into a place where films get made.
Bottom line: it didn't work out.
Still, even without doing something new, I recently looked into how much it would cost to make it happen with my own money.
In the film example: how much does it cost to make a film yourself?
In other words: "How much does it cost to make a dream come true?"
I researched online as far as I could, and almost everything was unreliable.
You might get a rough estimate, but often you still don't understand the operating flow.
Pathetically, I'm not enough of a risk-taker to leap with "you won't know until you try!" when I don't understand the flow — and it isn't that urgent — so my feeling was "well, save money for now and research for real someday."
Even so, it is a dream, so low urgency doesn't make it less important.
(※ Not putting resources into "not urgent but important" things is common in life — and actually putting resources there is really hard.)
Then, by chance, I told a friend I wanted to do something like this, and they said, "I know someone who knows this well — if you pay a research fee they'll look into it for you. Interested?"
The research fee was only tens of thousands of yen, not expensive, so I said yes immediately and had them research.
Bottom line: the research was very useful and satisfying.
What hit me was: "So this is about how much money it takes to make the dream real. I didn't even know the price of my own dream."
In the operating flow, one thing I alone hadn't understood became clear with numbers, and I really felt relieved.
Here's the main point: I only found that research contractor because my friend introduced them. I probably couldn't have reached them otherwise.
Looking back, almost all of my work runs on "referrals."
Client work in marketing and production — my main job — almost never comes from cold outbound sales.
It's pathetic, but I'm strongly bad at new business development. Weighing the stress against the return, I end up thinking "referral work alone is enough."
Even a tiny operator like me can get by because trust is handed over through introductions.
Conversely, when I feel "these two people would click," I'm happy to connect them. That's the natural "transfer of trust" inside economic activity.
The dynamics of referrals — the referral economy — feel enormous.
Friends asking "Do you know anyone who can do X?" is everyday life. Even if they're not in my acquaintance circle, if I follow "trusted" friends-of-friends, usually someone exists.
As dynamics of the referral economy, several important forces exist.
Of course referrals have upsides and downsides.
Getting introduced doesn't guarantee a good outcome. And because trust is deposited with the introducer too, the person referring also takes risk.
As I wrote before (points to watch when introducing people), there are cases where a self-styled "well-connected" person introduced someone who was useless — and made it feel like a favor.
Introducing transfers risk onto yourself, the introduced person, and the person who asked — so you should still be careful.
Set aside the silly cases and referrals still have structural problems.
A classic one is black-boxing the market by shutting out newcomers.
That's partly vested interests, and sometimes organizations that benefit from a solution never think about the whole-system optimum.
(※ Capitalism is oddly good at this — money can sometimes brute-force a replacement.)
Still, these dynamics exist at the nation-state level, and also domestically, regionally, in communities — in every kind of organization.
That doesn't mean I personally treat "vested interests" as evil and chase a purge. That approach is a bad hand.
Those dynamics exist and function — they are "rational."
Entrants should design functions that also benefit the existing system, and sometimes incentives are needed.
Realistically most organizations are doomed to decline if they don't scale, so offering design that also reduces risk is smart.
That got abstract — and because that kind of fight is a pain, and I have neither the guts nor the brains to confront things I can't control from my side, I don't do it.
Back to the strength of the referral economy: "information asymmetry" has been, and will remain, a stubborn problem no matter how far the information society develops.
Because that problem is so strong, smug middlemen, smooth-talk-only organizations, and scammy services never fully die out.
They don't give a damn about "trust." They're desperate to dump damage onto someone else.
Compared to that, the risks people imagine for the "referral economy" look milder.
And in a trust-based economy, even with exclusivity, there is at least referral trust — so appropriate introductions and blatantly fraudulent behavior are less often left completely alone.
(Counterexample: the self-styled "huge network" types above.)
Besides, the premise of a "fully open market" isn't realistic in terms of time, money, literacy, and so on.
At least for solving problems at the individual level, I personally think leaning on the power of the referral economy will keep being the most solid move.
P.S. Writing this far reminded me — that land-fraud case also produced damage through introductions.
P.S.2 And what cleverly hacked the referral economy described in this essay is SNS marketing — specifically influencer business. I won't deny that. But the original distortion wasn't resolved; it became a different distortion.
That's all.
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