I've just written a book. (It's about social implications of a technology.) Pretty much all the sales I'm making are networking, one way or another. It's a good book! People who read it love it! But it's self-published, and I haven't worked out how the heck to get people to write about it, and so my sales are all word of mouth from happy readers. It's just become a college textbook (!!) so I'm doing at least something right ...

Writing it was the same. I posted the whole draft to my Facebook in chunks, and this improved it amazingly, because my friends, like yours, are querulous nerds, and my goodness a querulous nerd given permission to be as querulous as they like, well. But I'm 50, and I've spent a few decades accumulating hundreds of contacts who are smart people who are experts in things that I'm not. And I totally relied on them to make this not suck.

I'm a huge nerd. But even my beep-boop sysadmin day job is, frankly, 50% public relations and getting people to do stuff because they feel they should because I asked nicely. Networking.

When I started, I too was bereft of network. But my first IT job was courtesy ... networking! And my second. And my third.

tl;dr Do your damnedest to be a social supernode. Make sure you know everyone, such that if you don't then you'll know someone who does. And keep in touch with them. It'll pay off big down the line.

(I went through Facebook last week and visited the pages of every one of the 1000+ people I have friended, to say hi and see what they were up to. Don't trust The Algorithm to maintain your relationships.)