Stephanie's guide has some great, prescriptive, just-steal-this-email ways to open conversations with people. I'd encourage you to use them. More importantly, I think you can follow her for a habitus of business based on helping people.
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There are ways to be helpful by sitting at home behind a keyboard, but take it from somebody who knows, the time-to-being-helpful cycle from blogging and writing HN comments is orders of magnitude longer than from seeking them out and starting a conversation.
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One of the joys of meeting smart people who are good at things is that they can compensate for areas you're weaker in. Case in point: you should probably not ask me for fashion advice. I was pleasantly surprised that Stephanie wanted to write about it.
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I have a funny relationship with suits. (Many people in tech do. What other item of clothing is used as a metonymy for The Enemy?) On the one hand, they're not my style. I don't particularly enjoy wearing them.
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But I have a quirky life circumstance: I live in Japan, as a foreigner, and the suit is my armor. The suit brands me a gainfully employed professional. The suit gets to walk into a bank like it has an account there. The suit is assumed to be literate.
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I used the "the suit is my armor" metaphor with my wife once. She told me "The jacket is your armor, too, right? Different game, different rules, same purpose." Seventeenth best reason to get married: you get awesome Twitter quotes as part of the deal. Ruriko is right.
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Appearance is sort of an opening bid on IRL interactions, much like visual design is an opening bid for websites. You get to choose whether you have 15% of qualified traffic immediately bounce or 80%. You also get to help traffic qualify.
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I'm not feeling not weird about feeling like I have to write an apologia for devoting non-zero effort to a thing I don't really emotionally care about, but it's a tactically useful technology. I'd encourage you to adopt it if you haven't already. Read Stephanie's advice.
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Speaking of tactically useful technologies: events. Speaking at them is a great way to get well-qualified consulting/job/sales/etc leads. But people perceive a great deal of difficulty in getting speaking slots. Pro-tip: organize the event and you get a speaking slot for free.
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Helping create the structures for your community of interest locally exposes you to a lot of knock-on benefits from it. My friend
@itsjaydesu runs the HN Meetup in Tokyo. It's been a major boon to his SaaS business: hiring, meeting investors, etc. (We also met there.)1 reply 0 retweets 13 likesShow this thread
The entire plan for the first version of that was "HN is a thing. People we would enjoy hanging out with in Tokyo read it. Let's tell them to meet us at a business which will rent us a room for a few hours." And then they did it monthly for 5+ years.
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Helping people and community building are nice tactics in that they scale with your success. They're easy to get started with so it is virtually never too early. Some of the outsized payoffs happen years later, when your scale/needs/etc could really use them.
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