In an effort to meet new people and make meaningful connections for my startup, I'm looking to fly out to California a couple of times in the next three months.
I'm wondering where I'd go? Conferences? Hacker news meetup (when's the next one?)?
How do you make connections? How do you promote your startup other than on the internet?
Let me know, maybe I'll meet some of you guys :)
My (completely accidental) approach is:
1. Spend four years being heavily involved in open source development (FreeBSD in my case) and gain a reputation for producing really cool software (both FreeBSD Update and Portsnap have elicited reactions of "how did we manage to survive before this was available" from multiple sources).
2. Announce that I'm working on a new project.
3. Watch as emails flood in from users of my earlier works who are convinced that whatever I'm working on right now has got to be the best thing since sliced bread.
Of course, I haven't launched publicly yet, and I don't know how many these enthusiastic people will end up paying to use my current project -- but it certainly won't hurt to have an established reputation for doing cool stuff.
"Then make something people want and ask money"
How'd you support yourself while working on the FreeBSD stuff, or did you get paid to do it? Do you think the same people who liked your open source work will turn tail at the thought of paying for software? Lots of them will, likely, but do you have indications that some won't?
I agree though, open source is a good place to be for a variety of reasons.
Given that many of these people were willing to pay me to write open source code, I'm sure that many of them will accept paying for online backups (especially because of the unavoidable hardware costs).
Anywhere I can sign up to be notified when you launch?
- http://barcamp.org/ - organize a news.yc meetup - make friends on irc, freenode, #facebook, #rubyonrails, etc, etc - depending on how far along your startup is you could probably try to set up some vc meetings