[mindcrime]

If you follow Steve Blank's approach, the ideal thing to do is start with "friendly first contacts" - that is, people you actually know personally and/or people who you are referred to by people you know personally. Then, once you get even a few "friendly first contact" meetings, you ask those people to refer you to their contacts, and so on in turn.

Note that this stuff is never as easy as it sounds on paper, but if you put enough effort in, it eventually works (in my experience anyway).

Also note that even if you're not pitching a product for sale (yet) asking people for their time for an interview is still an ask. Ideally you'd like to be able to offer to compensate people for their time somehow. I don't mean paying them cash or anything, but think about how to structure your invitations in such a way as to communicate that you're offering them something in return for their time. That "something" might be "an early peek at a revolutionary new technology for ABC" or whatever you can think of that is a way of giving some value to them. Be creative.

Also, it's not always the easiest thing to go in asking people "what are your pain points" in an extremely open-ended way. You might find that it's easier to start with a hypothesis about a possible pain point, and pitch things in terms of "We've noticed that firms like yours often have to deal with problem $FOOBAR. To that end, we're developing a novel solution for $FOOBAR, and we'd love a few minutes of your time (no sales pitch!) to talk about how $FOOBAR and related problems affect you. In return for a 30 minute interview, we'll offer you $SOMETHING".

[yr1337]

I'll check Steve Blank out (didn't know him), but I've been trying to follow this technique ad-hoc. Like you said, easier said than done. Even friendly people aren't very responsive to requests for intros. In the few interviews I did I made a point to ask for intros at the end and although they say "sure", it's crickets afterwards.

This is a humbling realization of what salespeople are up against. We all love to hate on these guys but man... What a hustle and you need armor-like skin and insane optimism and persistence.

[tonyarkles]

> In the few interviews I did I made a point to ask for intros at the end and although they say "sure", it's crickets afterwards.

Are you doing these in person or virtually? If you're doing it in person, you're already at the end and have the data you're looking for from the person you're talking with. "Do you know any other people I should talk to?" "Yeah" "Ok, could I just write their names down right now here?"

[spxneo]

see this is why "startup" is so much harder than running a "business"

a "business" already works on what is built or established, refining processes to branch off beaten paths to sales/marketing

a "startup" operates with too many unknowns for the average person, 99% failure means only 1% of the people figure out the unknowns to become a "business"

I just don't understand why people just default to "startup". You should be focused on running a business and make a 15 cents out of a dollar spent, not spend a dollar to make 15 cents in hopes that someone will "buy you out" or you "ipo"

such are pipe dreams