How I “hacked” business networking.

How I have grown my professional network by being in the right place at the right time.

I must admit that I don’t have great networking skills. However, I know enough people in the start-up community to make an impression that I‘m brilliant at networking. This is a brutal truth behind how I have achieved this.

1. ) Choosing events that are specific to your area of expertise. I have chosen networking events that are related to things that I know a lot about.
2. ) Pitching / presentation events. Since I have an interest in creating compelling ideas, I have always chosen events where there is a requirement to talk about them or pitch them. So I have mentioned a couple of them, and this was my “chat up line”. The more questions the idea raised, the better. That allowed me a possibility to ask questions as well.
3. ) Doing the research. For events that don’t require pitching or presentation, I did my research. I have looked at people that were going to come. I aimed to speak to them and I also had some prepared questions. So I always made sure that I had compelling things to talk about. If I haven’t managed to speak to anyone that I wanted to, I approached someone that just has spoken to that person. This strategy has *always* worked, even if the conversations ended up going in the wrong direction. Also, I made a genuine effort *not* to come across as a fan-boy.
4. ) Following up with people that I was talking with. I usually e-mailed and posted links to them. That’s how you actually build your network.

Note that none of these events were business lunches, dinners or award ceremonies, which require a much higher level of engagement and diplomacy skills. I have managed to avoid those without damaging my reputation.

Overall, it looks like an enormous amount of work for something so relatively trivial. The moral of the story is: you always have to put a lot of extra effort into something that you’re not naturally good at. In the end, it might pay off spectacularly, but it will be tiring as hell.

P.S — My new year’s resolution is less networking events and less tech conferences. This year, I’m inventing a way to evaluate ideas.