Ask HN: How do I find a marketing/sales/business guy (university)?
Even though we have a few customers on board and I'm getting some great feedback, I have no idea how to get more people in the feedback loop. There's no way the lunch-and-how's-it-going process is going to scale to hundreds of customers. My cofounder and I have sat down and basically have determined that we need to find someone with serious people skills who can go out and talk to potential customers, aggregate feedback, and give us some pulse on how to move forward. Do we need to add feature X? Change the billing process? Change the product? I have no idea, because I can only talk to three customers at once and still keep development moving quickly.
I'm at a (fairly technical/nerdy) university campus and I can't seem to find that guy†. (Our market at the moment is professors/education, so campus is pretty relevant). S/he's not in the CS/math/engineering departments, obviously (my social circles). I'm also decent at literature and music, and know a lot of those people--none of which are really sales-ey.
Short of turning up in the School of Business and saying "So, do you have any decent students?" in a condescending tone I'm not sure what actual, practical steps I can take to find someone who can go find potential customers.
1) Where do the people who are good at marketing/sales/business hang out?
2) How do I tell whether a candidate is any good?
† Or should that guy be finding me / selling himself on me? Am I going about this all wrong?
A) Our test market is our current professors, so finding another student (or someone at least affiliated with the school / nearby) is better than not
B) Yes, I could go take business classes / read books and such (and I've learned a ton this year) but the work involved really deserves a dedicated person.