Who Changes Your Business?

I never shut up about systems.

Lots of what we teach you to do at Tacklebox is to create systems that allow you to generate tons of outreach or action without needing a ton of willpower to do it. Or, that’s the goal.

The reason is both logistical and emotional.

Logistical - if you send lots of cold emails and DMs and join lots of forums and show up at the place your customer hangs out - and if you do it in a smart and helpful way - you’ll get lots of interviews which will lead to lots of insights that’ll help you form a hypothesis around a first customer we can test. It’s a numbers game, and there’s usually only one or two of you, so… we gotta figure out how to juice the numbers without spamming.

Emotional - this type of proactive work is new and uncomfortable which means without a system most people won’t do it. And… again… it’s a numbers game. So, systems let us hit those numbers.

The one problem with this approach is that it sometimes ignores the power one connection can have.

My old boss at J&J used to ask startups this question:

“Who, if you sat down with them for 30 minutes, could change your business?”

When the answer was, “Mark Cuban so that he could invest” or the CEO of the biggest possible customer, my boss would say, “Try again.”

The goal was to get them to someone more strategic — someone who had information they couldn’t get anywhere else.

Whenever a startup gave a good answer, he’d say, “Great — now, how can we get them in a room in the next week?”

“Never underestimate the impact the right person can have,” he’d say, “The right conversation can change your business.”

When I was starting Find Your Lobster, the former founder and CEO of OKCupid had recently been appointed CEO of match.com. There was no one with more industry knowledge, and I had industry questions. Namely, why was I the only one building a dating app using Facebook profiles?

So, I emailed him once a week for a month or two asking smart industry questions and giving suggestions about Match. Finally, I wrote an email that said, “I’ll be in Chicago on Thursday — can I buy you a coffee?”

“Sure,” he replied. “I’ve got time at 11am, meet me at the Starbucks in my lobby.”

So, I booked a flight to Chicago for that Thursday. We chatted about the industry and about how he was weary of Facebook owning the data of his customers — how the benefit (fast signup) wouldn’t be worth the risk, so they’d never have profiles that included Facebook info. But, he said if he were starting a dating app from scratch today, he’d go all in on Facebook to beat the natural cold start problem all networks have. The risk was worth it in that scenario. Then, he told me how he’d do it. Everything that worked about Find Your Lobster came from that 45 minute conversation.

There’s someone out there who can change your business because of their unique experience or network.

Who are they?

How can you over-index on getting in touch?

How can you build a strategy to make sure you get in a room with them?