I have a confession. The first time I scrolled through CoSell, I kept thinking of ideas and then talking myself out of them. Who was I to suggest anything? I'm one person with a laptop and a lot of opinions about fonts. Proposals felt like something companies did, in meeting rooms, with slides.
I was wrong, and I suspect a lot of people browsing are making the same mistake.
Look at what's actually on the feed. Someone has 4,000 digitised maps covering local history, transport and land use, and is looking for someone who can turn them into something useful. Not "a company". Someone. A retired aerospace engineer has forty years of notebooks and no plan for them. A diver has twenty years of reef and wreck footage sitting on drives and tapes.
None of these owners asked for a corporation. Most of them said, in one way or another, "open to ideas". An idea is exactly what one person can bring.
Say you're a history student who's good with mapping tools. You could propose building a small interactive site where people see how their street changed over a century. Say you edit videos on weekends. You could offer to cut a short series from that underwater footage and split whatever it earns. Say you're a teacher. Those aerospace notebooks might become the most interesting lesson your class has all year.
Or say you bake. Properly bake, the kind where friends have been telling you to "do something with it" for years, but a commercial kitchen costs more than you'll earn in your first six months. There's a kitchen in Miami Beach that sits empty every day until 4pm. You could propose using it in the mornings, early bakes out the door before the owner's team even arrives, and pay a share of what you sell. Their empty hours become your first bakery. Nobody had to buy an oven.
That's a proposal. A clear idea, why you, and what you'd each get from it. It can be three sentences long.
What seems to make owners reply isn't size. It's specificity. "I'd love to collaborate" says nothing. "I'd scan the 1970s transport maps first, because that's the period people search for most, and build a simple before-and-after viewer" tells them you've actually looked. One person who has clearly read the listing will beat a polished pitch that could have been sent to anyone.
And yes, sometimes you'll hear no. That's fine. A no from someone who read your idea properly is still a conversation you didn't have yesterday. The owner decides, you're not signing anything by suggesting, and nobody sends you an invoice for having an imagination.
The funny thing is that plenty of companies started exactly like this. One person noticed something nobody else was using and asked if they could try.
I still don't have a deck. I do have a list of listings I keep going back to.
Which one have you been thinking about?