Meet new people-Greet new ideas
Good things happen when you meet strangers.
Every week, I write an article to share my learning or discovery during my startup journey. Here is the link to my reasons for penning these articles for myself and for many others like me.
In the startup journey, I have learned that it helps to talk to strangers. Especially when you are a solopreneur and do not have a team in place besides yourself. Right now, I am looking for new ideas, vetting them, and doing some customer interviews for validation. I also keep on checking what others are building on different forums.
As I connect on different forums where I can find a lot of entrepreneurs like me. It is always useful to check what they are building. In case their idea resonates with you, send them a direct message. In my case, I have connected with people on Reddit or Slack or Medium. Sometimes, I search them on LinkedIn and send a connection request with a personal note explaining how I found them.
I will share the instances of two such meetings. In both these cases, I talked to strangers and felt positive vibes, and learned new things from them. The first person, I found was on medium. I read his article on his startup journey. I liked the article and his journey looked identical to mine. After a lot of hard work, he was able to get customers and could generate MRR. I got inspired by his journey and decided to connect with him to know more about his journey. I searched on Linkedin, found him, and sent a connection request with a note about reading his article on medium.com. He readily accepted my connection request. Later I asked him for a 30 min zoom meeting. He accepted my meeting invite too. In the meeting, I told him that I liked his article and wanted to hear more about his startup journey. Later I told him about my challenge in getting paid customers. He shared with me the two websites where you can find email ids of decision-makers from different companies. You can use them for your email outreach program. This was a piece of new and useful piece of information for me. We both talked about our unsuccessful attempts to find customers via paid channels like google ads and sales navigator.
I felt this conversation has helped me in two ways 1) Got new information about the leads database 2) Others also faced similar issues with some platforms, so it validates that my understanding or conclusion about that platform is correct.
The second person I met was on a slack channel for entrepreneurs. In his introduction message, he mentioned how he wants to build a product but does not get an idea of what to build and does not know where to start. I felt like he was in the same boat as me. Regarding idea generation, he is struggling like me. I DM him and asked to have a meeting. He agreed and we talked over a zoom call. It was a refreshing meeting for me. He is a developer and was brimming with a lot of ideas. As I had started my career as a software developer, we were speaking a similar technical language as well and were discussing the logic behind every feature. I shared a few entrepreneurs’ stuff with him, that has helped me in my startup journey. In the meeting, we decided to explore an idea further. Again, this connection helped me in two ways 1) Brainstorming of product ideas at the implementation level (which developers love to do) 2) Roleplays between a developer and an end-user to validate some ideas.
I would suggest to my fellow entrepreneurs to be open to meeting fellow entrepreneurs regularly. In fact, now my weekly to-do list contains an item — “Talk to 2 strangers”.
As Steve Jobs said, “Stay hungry-Stay foolish”. In the same spirit, I will say “Meet new people-Greet new ideas”
Wishing you a great week. Hope you meet and greet new ideas with many people
If anyone of you wants to brainstorm their ideas with me, please feel free to set up a 30 min call with me here. This is free because learning with each other is priceless.
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