The Official IdeaMensch

Imagine this place.

A place where dozens of people come up with a bucket load of good ideas every day, most of which get squashed by other people (not consumers, I should say) who believe they know to be the judge of what ideas should live and die. Most die. Oftentimes even the really good ones. And the ones that survive, well, more often than not those ideas are so compromised that by the time they’re brought to life, consumers show absolutely no to very little interest in the ideas.

A place where great ideas are made to die?

Well, that place was Advertising for me.

My name is Mario and I am the founder of IdeaMensch. I spent a decade in various advertising management roles and grew increasingly frustrated by our collective inability to bring great ideas to life. I started looking for people and places where great ideas actually were brought to life. If even the most creative of industries couldn’t bring ideas to life, who could?

The answer was entrepreneurs.

I started emailing a bunch of entrepreneurs who I admired and asked them how they brought ideas to life. I always asked the same questions and always got different answers. With their permission I published those emails as interviews. The people I interviewed then forwarded on the questions to entrepreneurs they admired. Five years later, we have done over 2,000 interviews with some pretty cool people ranging from Seth Godin, Daniel Pink, Craig Newmark, Brad Feld, Nancy Brinker and a pig farmer in Iowa.

I learned the best teachers are entrepreneurs themselves. Not just the famous one. We all have something to teach, even if it’s a failure.

At some point we decided to turn the interviews into a talk format. That format led to a road trip across America (http://im48.co). Three friends and I stepped into my Honda Element and hit the road. We ended up organizing an event in every state, with hundreds of speakers and thousands of guests. Mashable was kind enough to write about it.

Our goal is to help you bring your idea to life, by getting others to share how they did it.

IdeaMensch is a community created for people who bring ideas to life.

IdeaMensch is for you.