During COVID, I got a message from a guy named Farid asking me to call him.
There wasn't much context. I assumed he was another reseller looking for inventory, which was pretty common at the time, and I almost ignored it.
I called him back.
He said he needed five Mac Pros.
I asked, “Are you reselling them?”
“No. We're Snapchat.”
Okay, that got my attention.
They needed high-end Mac Pros for software testing, but this was right in the middle of the COVID supply crunch. High-end Macs were difficult to find, some configurations were selling for way more than normal, and waiting on standard supply wasn't always an option.
We started with five.
We sourced the machines, upgraded and configured them for what their team needed, and shipped them out.
Then they needed more.
So we kept finding them.
Later, the requests expanded into Mac minis too.
What started with a vague message and five Mac Pros eventually grew into roughly $500,000 in hardware supplied to Snap.
And I almost ignored the message.
That first message didn't look like a $500,000 opportunity. It looked like an easy lead to skip. I called back, found out what they actually needed, and then kept solving the next thing while supply chain problems were making it hard for anyone to get the hardware they wanted.
I've been doing this since 2008, and a lot of the work has been some version of that. A business has a problem, and I figure out how to solve it.