I've been amazed at the quality and quantity of networking the DataScaler team has been doing. We decided to start networking in earnest about 2.5 weeks ago. In that time, we've met with 30+ individuals with many more to come. Almost every lunch and breakfast is booked with someone. We've targeted several types of individuals:
- Sales people who can help us get product validation meetings with customers
- Technical people who can act as advisors and eventually employees
- Strategic advisors from the industry we are targeting
- Professors and PhD students doing research in our area
When you add in the meetings with potential customers, we end up spending a lot of time talking to people. This has been amazingly helpful. While this reduces the amount of time we have for product development, it radically increases our chances of creating a product that customers will actually buy when it is released. So many startups have the "if you build it they will come" philosophy. We reject that concept and instead believe we have to pre-sell the product while it's being developed. This is working really well so far. It's great to see other people get excited about the DataScaler vision.
Very nice blog Chad and some great posts so far!
Looking forward to following your success with DataScaler and also to picking up some helpful information from your blog.
Keep up the great "positive" work and I'll be sending you some constructive energy in the form of positive thoughts.
Best regards,
Doug
Posted by: Doug Nelson | August 21, 2007 at 11:10 AM