How to get people to talk to you about your ideas

Part 2 of the PMF Sprint Playbook

In Part 1, we covered what a PMF sprint is and how to prep.

Today we’ll tackle the toughest step: getting busy prospects to say “yes” to a 15-minute call so you can validate, or kill, your hypothesis fast.

Below is a proven 5-step outreach ‘playbook’ that should enable you to have at least 10 conversations per week.

Reaching out

This is the hardest part. You’ll want to start this as soon as you have a rough idea of the persona in your hypothesis as it will take a while to get your first responses and start getting some time booked in your diary. Do this first and then in parallel to everything else.

If I could give my younger self a single piece of advice it would be:

Your network is your unfair advantage—invest early, compound forever.

Go to meet-ups, conferences. Be curious. Be kind. Make meaningful connections. Keep in touch. Start doing this as early as possible in your career and never stop. If you do this right you’ll end up with a high quality network of people that will help you in more ways than you can imagine, including talking to you about your ideas.

🌐 Step 1: Your own network

This is the simplest and most obvious. If you’re lucky or you’re building something you and your friends might use then it should be pretty easy to reach out to them and ask them for 15 minutes of their time.

You can also put out a post on LinkedIn or target specific people you’ve met in the past or go around your co-working space and offer to buy them a coffee.

The message doesn’t need to be sophisticated at this point. Here’s a simple 2-line DM:

Hey {Name}! I’m exploring a problem many [persona]s face. Free for a quick 15-min chat next week? No pitch, just research. Coffee’s on me ☕

Track every message you send. Momentum is a metric. On top of that, if your co-founders ask you what you’ve been doing all day then you have a clear answer.

📣 Step 2: Your network’s network

This is probably the most effective way of getting the ball rolling. You might not know anyone in your own network that fits the persona you’re looking for but it is extremely likely that someone you know can introduce you to one.

You’ve probably already done the obvious and asked your investors or colleagues but have you really tapped into the full potential of your network? Think about your extended family (distant cousins), everyone you’ve ever worked with, people you met at a party, etc…

If you remember anything from this post, it should be that the best thing you can do to get more conversations scheduled is to ask each participant to make introductions for you. Think of it like a flywheel: getting the first few calls is hard but once you have a couple the introductions will compound and next thing you know you will have spoken to 20 different people in under 2 weeks about your idea.

I generally close conversations with the following simple questions:

1. What haven’t we discussed that you think is worth mentioning?

2. Can you introduce me to anyone that you think would be relevant to [persona] or [problem]?

The first question gives the person a chance to bring up something that you might not have thought of asking or focusing on. What they say will give you an inkling into what they think is important or care about. Lenny is an excellent interviewer and if you listen to his podcasts, you’ll notice he always asks this question.

The main lesson I’ve learnt here is that 90% of people are generous and willing to help you given that you have some connection to them.

The stronger the connection the less you need to worry about your outbound messaging.

The best thing to do is to get the person who has the strong connection to do the introductions and take it from there. If that’s not possible, I’ve found that a heartfelt and honest message with a sprinkle of flattery and vulnerability works best.

Hey [name], [mutual friend] spoke very highly of you and recommended I get in touch. I don’t know much about [X] and I was hoping you could give me 15 minutes of your time so I can pick your brain on the topic. Not trying to sell you anything, just looking for a casual chat :)

In all of your outbound messaging it’s important to emphasise that the reason you’re reaching out is not to try to sell them something or ask them something that would make them uncomfortable, e.g. poaching clients or stealing information.

3. 💬 Communities, forums and social

Hopefully you’re already part of some founder communities or social groups. These can be a bit noisy, so not a huge amount of people pay attention to them but you can put out a short post and you might get lucky. Reddit can work too but I’ve personally not had a huge amount of success connecting with people on there.

The thing I’ve found works best is to create an opinion poll or ask for help on a topic related to what your problem is or what your persona cares about. Go for something trendy or a contrarian opinion as those are the ones that get the most engagement. For example, a friend of mine recently put out a post entitled: AI killed the AI engineer, AI engineering is dead…

Here another example of a poll I ran in various CTO and dev communities to get introduced to product engineers.

Once you get some responses, reach out to each individual to thank them for participating and either: ask if they are up for a casual chat on the topic, or if they can introduce you to anyone that fits your persona.

4. 🤝 Go where they hang out

This is another tactic I’ve found useful and had success with. Your persona is likely to spend time somewhere in the internet digesting content relevant to their industry or somewhere physically networking with their peers. I’ve put this second to last because it’s the most involved and might not yield any tangible results in a reasonable amount of time.

This goes back to an earlier point I made: the best place to organically meet people and make genuine connections are at meet-ups and conferences. Find the ones your personas go to and go there yourself. I personally found this one quite difficult because I’m an introvert and I used to struggle to strike up a conversation with total strangers, but like most things: the more you do it the better you get.

Find out what content they consume and where. Hopefully you will have already scheduled a few calls and you can do this by making it one of your closing remarks:

• What newsletters do you subscribe to?

• What podcasts do you listen to?

• Who do you follow on socials?

• What associations, clubs, or meet-ups do you attend?

• What online communities are you a part of?

• What conferences do you go to?

• When you need to network with other [your-titles], what do you do?

Perhaps it’s a newsletter or an influencer. Reach out to them for intros, they might indulge you and connect you with a few people directly. Worst case scenario you will have also found out what channels will be worth putting some marketing spend behind if you start getting some traction.

5. 🥶 Cold outbound (when all else fails)

The name says it all, use sales tool such as Apollo or LinkedIn Sales Navigator to send outbounds to your ideal persona. Crafting a short, casual, solid message is key here to get some responses. Remember to compliment and show vulnerability. You can give some brief context by selling a vision as long as you keep it vague:

I’m trying to make desk & office rental less of a pain for new businesses.

Expect around 1 response out of 100.

Common pitfalls

Avoid the following mistakes. Trust me.

Asking for a lot of time

You need to put the bar so low that they can’t think of any objections. 30 or 60 minutes sounds like a lot of time to dedicate even though, in practice, a lot of conversations I’ve had lasted this long despite agreeing to a much shorter timeline.

Along the same vein, offer to meet in person and go to their office to make it completely frictionless.

Fake premise

I’ve not done this myself but I have heard that it can work. You might be tempted to lie or embellish the reason you’re reaching out, for example:

I’m writing a book on [X], would I be able to interview you for market research

You will probably get better responses but in my experience this usually backfires unless you are actually doing what you said since, as with all lies (however innocent), you are digging yourself into a corner and it will be difficult to climb out of it to get genuine learnings. It could end up restricting the questions you want to ask or steer the conversation in the wrong direction.

Forgetting the flywheel

This is actually probably the most common one I’ve seen time and again.

Always close with:

Who else should I talk to?

Final thoughts

Let’s do a quick recap of the most important things you will have learned from this post:

• Get into the habit of meeting new people and growing your network

• Get to know investors or very experienced mentors if you can - they have amazing networks

• Be genuine and honest about why you’re reaching out - otherwise you’ll have a hard time getting valuable insights

Your goal is to have at least 2 conversations a day so aim for 20 in 2 weeks.

In the next post we’ll cover interview frameworks that separate signal from noise. Subscribe below so it lands in your inbox first.

Good luck out there!