I just read a blog post – catching up on some reading backlog – by someone I’ve met in passing over the past few months. It was an okay interaction. I wouldn’t say we connected, or that there was a lot of alignment on our product philosophies and targets. I didn’t expect this outcome, though. I’m pretty sure her blog’s not-particularly-flattering description of “an entrepreneur” is a poorly anonymized sketch of me.
Haven’t had that happen before.
I suppose it comes with the territory: new company, going out and meeting lots of people, trying to talk about the product and the problems we want to solve, before I have a demo to show how awesome it’s going to be. Kind of a strange sensation to be quick-skimming RSS feeds and have that creeping realization… OMG, that’s me. Ugh. I’m sure there are some lessons I can take away from this interaction.
- Every new meeting is The Pitch, even when it probably shouldn’t be. Some of these new contacts are just, well, interesting and possibly helpful contacts. But more often than not it seems they expect to be pitched, and at the very least she was annoyed that I wasn’t in pitch-mode when we met.
- Even if I don’t think there’s much to be gained for the company or me personally, I need to treat new and follow-up interactions as though the contact is Very Important To Us. That’s going to take some practice. Once I get used to having that bit flipped On all the time, hopefully I can flip it back Off. I can count on my friends/family/colleagues will keep me from trending into insufferable, right?
- Speaking of insufferable – I need to be myself even when pressured to be More Like Standard-Issue Entrepreneur Type. My Pitch(es) need to be sincere and in my own style. I don’t intend to adopt the nearly cookie-cutter buzzword bingo style pitches that I hear repeated. If the same spiel over and over is maddening to me, how must it be to those who are listening to them 20 times a week? This is harder than it sounds. You want to be heard by your audience, and there’s a reason for this homogeniety. It works. Well, at least it’s worked in recent memory. I’m not interested in reinventing the (Pitch) wheel, but there’s a sweet spot in there where I can have these conversations effectively without being a total poseur.
Takeaways: It takes practice to get your message across without being too reserved or completely fake. I’ll mark that contact up as a practice round and move on.