One of the BIGGEST Things Founders Mess Up On 🚀

You're ready to launch your product (or you will be soon), so naturally your next tactic is to start trying to drum up a little buzz. But it's slow, because you haven't built out the necessary community or support network beforehand. So you start "networking." Only it isn't really networking because what you're actually doing is *selling.* (Or trying to, anyway). And this is where a LOT of founders get in their own way early on. 🤔 It's critical to understand that networking & selling have two fundamentally different goals. ➡️ 1) Selling is about completing a transaction ➡️ 2) Networking is about broadening your ultimate reach Where people trip themselves up from day one is confusing talking with selling. Your networking is NOT going to benefit from simply adapting your sales funnel to it. Networking is not about a 1, 2, 3-step equation type of dynamic. People are not numbers or data. When you're dealing with people and building networks, you need to account for others' schedules, irrational mindsets, time-lags, and a ton of other factors you can't anticipate and distill into a funnel. Become comfortable with simply having conversations every day in the community that AREN'T centered around "gathering feedback" for your product. (I guarantee that the more conversations you have in the community, the more you will inevitably learn about your product's fit anyway.) 🌱 When building an MVP, the goal isn’t to hit it out to the park with a billion-dollar company from day one. It’s to get something out the door, collect as much honest feedback on it as possible, and make incremental improvements over time. Coming in guns blazing works in the movies, but rarely works in reality. The same is true for building networks. Coming into the environment with your seller’s hat on from “day one, hour one” is a surefire way to make sure that most of the people with whom you want to network will never answer your email or return your call. It communicates to them that your only interest is in selling them something or asking for something. And that makes all your networking transactional -- as opposed to non-transactional. If you want access (to a network of VCs, journalists, supporters, etc.), then you need to be engaged in the dialogue in order to exist and find the on-ramp to the broader relationship. And you can’t do so in a selling capacity, because this will effectively shut the door in your face. 🚪 So where does that leave you? How do you build a network if your main talking technique -- selling -- is unavailable to you? You do so by engaging with the people in your network *before* you start launching anything. *Before* you start asking for things like time or value. Obviously none of us have time machines, so if you haven't started this process already, you can't go back six months. But the next best answer is to start now. Okay, so you already launched your company or product. Then that means you should be spending as much time talking to people in the community (NOT selling!!) as you do iterating the product. I guarantee that the more time you spend talking in the community (and not selling!), the more people will be naturally incentivized to take a look at what you're working on. 🗣️ Remember that the point of any conversation is to get to the next conversation. That conversation may end in a sale, but that doesn't mean you're "done" with the dialogue. Maintain that conversation and see how it can grow in the long-term. ⏳