I Built a Network of Strangers

When I started Catapaultt, I wrote down everyone I knew who could hire me or introduce me to someone who could. Former bosses and people I had spent years in the trenches with. It was a good list. I never called a single name on it.

Instead, I went looking for strangers. I signed up for conferences and introduced myself to people who had never heard my name. I hit every chamber event and founder meetup on the calendar and came home with stacks of business cards from people who had no idea whether I was any good at what I was offering.

That went on for the better part of a year.

If you had asked me then, I would have told you I was building a pipeline. What I was actually doing was waiting until I had something to show. I wanted real points on the board and a website that looked like a real firm instead of a woman in her home office with an idea. I wanted proof in hand before I approached anyone whose opinion mattered to me.

There is another piece of it that took me longer to admit. Strangers were easy because they didn't know who I used to be. The people on the list knew me well. They had seen my wins and my failures. There was history there.

So I built a network from scratch while the one I already had sat there.

A few weeks ago I sat down with a friend who runs a beauty business. She is adding a new service that will require her to have live sales meetings with customers. The people most likely to buy are the salon owners in her building. They rent suites down her hallway and she sees them every day.

The marching orders out of our strategy session were simple. Write a pitch, don't worry about whether it's good, and talk to five or six people in the building.

I checked in three weeks later and she hadn't spoken to a single person. She had spent three weeks perfecting the pitch. Rewriting it and reading it back to herself until it sounded right.

I told her the thing somebody should have told me. I was new at this once too, and if I had waited until I was ready I would still be waiting.

She worked hard for three weeks but no one saw her work. I did the same thing for a year. My cost was higher than the registration fees and the travel.

A pitch a customer never hears is not real. Rewriting it a hundred times doesn't make it real. The only thing that turns it into something usable is watching somebody's face while you say it and hearing their feedback after. That is when you find out what's working and what needs to change.

Her first conversation in that hallway would have been rough, and it would also have been the fastest edit she was ever going to get. Same for my first call to somebody who already knew my name.

Somebody told me once that small wins become big wins. A small win is one conversation with one person who might say no and still give you something you can use in the next conversation. A perfect pitch sitting in a document counts as nothing, and it can sit there for years without ever costing you a rejection. That is exactly why it’s so comfortable to keep working on it.

You have a version of this somewhere. Something you have put a lot of hours into that nobody knows about. The question is who is already close enough to say yes, and what you have decided you need to have in hand before you talk to them.

This week pick one person who could say yes and share the version you have now.

You will be bad at it, and that is the point. Bad in front of somebody is information you can use. Perfect in a document is not real information.

Until next Tuesday.
Ceaneh