Re:Jessica Livingston’s Pretty Complete List on How Not to Fail
by nostrademons on Thursday June 09, 2016 @03:38PM
(#11871755)
For most people on the business end of things, networking is your job.
There's a whole world out there that technologists like us rarely pay attention to, which mostly consists of building relationships with other people whose only job is networking so that when their company is looking to purchase, they think of us. Familiarity is a remarkably effective distortion on our evaluation of what is "good", and many technologists who didn't realize this ended up building something that nobody ever heard of.
The reason YC (and other top startup advisors) say to ignore this isn't that it's unimportant, it's that you can fairly easily hire all the people whose day job is networking once you have a product that people want on its own merits, while if nobody wants your product, you'll have to hire them at fat prices to get anywhere. It's a matter of negotiating leverage: show up at the table with something people really want and you will find plenty of people willing to help sell it, while if you spend all your time trying to sell what nobody wants, it will never become something people want.
There's a whole world out there that technologists like us rarely pay attention to, which mostly consists of building relationships with other people whose only job is networking so that when their company is looking to purchase, they think of us. Familiarity is a remarkably effective distortion on our evaluation of what is "good", and many technologists who didn't realize this ended up building something that nobody ever heard of.
The reason YC (and other top startup advisors) say to ignore this isn't that it's unimportant, it's that you can fairly easily hire all the people whose day job is networking once you have a product that people want on its own merits, while if nobody wants your product, you'll have to hire them at fat prices to get anywhere. It's a matter of negotiating leverage: show up at the table with something people really want and you will find plenty of people willing to help sell it, while if you spend all your time trying to sell what nobody wants, it will never become something people want.