Comment by t_mann | Hacker News Reader

Comment by t_mann | Hacker News Reader

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> Before I wrote a single line of code I had spent a week talking to potential customers and even before that I had spent a week doing customer research and identifying potential ideas that I wanted to work on.

This sounds like a great approach to any startup / for-profit project that easily goes overlooked. However, I guess most people will still get stuck at this point:

> I had built a relationship with other open source projects so I knew where my early customers was going to be.

Background: I have an idea that I think might be interesting for large corporations with lots of retail customers, specifically mobile service providers, ISPs,... However, I don't know anyone at T-Mobile or similar, so I've been carrying the idea around for a long time. It'd probably be more of a consulting-style gig than a startup initially, since it'd need to be heavily tailored for each of those giant idiosyncratic businesses. Any thoughts or suggestions much appreciated.

Anyway, thanks for sharing, OP!

Cold out reach on LinkedIn to the people at these companies that might be buyers. Tell them your an entrepreneur doing user research and you think they might have valuable insight into a problem space your interested in. People love talking to entrepreneurs and they love talking about their problems. So just phrase it so those 2 things come across and make sure they don’t think it’s a sales call (at least until you are ready to sell something)

There is a book called “The Mom Test” that covers this part of market discovery very well. Aligns almost exactly w/ how OP approached it.

> However, I don't know anyone at T-Mobile or similar, so I've been carrying the idea around for a long time.

You could always try and get a job at one of these business for a year, with the primary goal of building connections.

He'll get a nda as soon as he get into the door, that won't help.

Bold move, hadn't thought of that, thanks for sharing.

If you're good at selling yourself (or more realistically/usefully, if you think you might be willing to practise until you become good enough) relatively quickly[0], it might be worth going to an industry event or two, and pitching yourself / your proposal to as many people at as many companies as possible. Maybe you'll get a useful contact or two from the exercise, at the very least you'll learn something about to improve your self promotion, maybe learn more about the industry and the needs of people in it, maybe even come away with a lead that becomes your first client.

Of course, this relies on being able to afford tickets to, and likely travel/accommodation around, whatever event(s) will attract the sort of people you're interested in. And putting yourself out there, time after time, hour after hour, each time projecting the confidence that "hey even though we've just met and I don't know what your working hours consist of I'm confident enough in what I want to discuss that it's not a waste of either of our time", is easier suggested than done for many people.

[0] The upside to iglio's suggestion of working at a company to network is that you can build relationships slowly and organically rather than having to impress very quickly to get even an hour meeting, then kick ass in that hour to get a next one, etc. Plus, you gain a reputation for actually contributing to the industry rather than potentially appearing as an outsider going "With no experience I still know better than you" (shouldn't be too hard to avoid giving off that vibe though).

And if one is not good at self promotion, invest some dollars in professionals writing pitches, see what works.

Often people sink a lot of money into attendance and then get there with improvised messaging - today is super easy to delegate everything and boost one chances

People might be familiar with Google analytics and ab testing and whatnot and then forget everything about it in different verticals just because they don't do the connection.

I have done that in a recent search for a rental apartment, I went from the initial one answer/week into two scheduled appointments/day just by tuning first contact messaging and was top of the pick in the unit I eventually rented thanks to reaching out with a professional. Total cost was 350€ which I'll get back into a few month as I could land a highly sought aftar apartment which was under budget for the zone/quality.

It's the same basic stuff we do on the job - branch out, measure outcome, refine, repeat. No need to be good at selling oneself, it just need time and delegation.

Interesting, what profession would that be? Some kind of PR firm, or is there something more specialized for pointed jobs/personal advice like this?

Copywriters at the cheapish end, pr at the high end, specialized services in between (i.e. there are those that specialize in resumes)

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