A developer's guide to actually finding people to talk to — and making them want to talk to you
So you know how to ask good questions (Chapter 1-3), keep things casual (Chapter 4), and push for real commitments (Chapter 5). Great. But there's one problem nobody talks about enough: where do you actually find these people to talk to?
Chapter 6 is Fitzpatrick's playbook for finding conversations. And the core insight surprised me: you don't need to be a networking wizard. You just need to be strategic about where you show up and how you ask.
Outline
In this post, I'll break down Chapter 6 into the following sections:
- Going to Them: Cold Outreach — Why cold conversations are a necessary evil and how to make the most of them (cold calls, serendipity, finding excuses, immersing yourself, landing pages, and getting clever).
- Bringing Them to You — How to flip the dynamic so customers find you instead (organising meetups, speaking & teaching, industry blogging).
- Creating Warm Intros — The gold standard for conversations and how to manufacture them (7 degrees of bacon, industry advisors, universities, investors, and cashing in favours).
- Asking For and Framing the Meeting — The 5-element framework (Vision/Framing/Weakness/Pedestal/Ask) for getting meetings without sounding salesy.
- To Commute or to Call — Why in-person beats phone calls, and when exceptions make sense.
- The Advisory Flip — A powerful mindset shift that makes customer conversations feel natural instead of desperate.
- How Many Meetings Do You Actually Need? — When to stop talking and start building.
Going to Them: Cold Outreach
Let's be real — cold outreach sucks. Nobody likes cold calls, and nobody likes receiving them. But sometimes, especially at the very beginning, you have no choice. You don't know anyone in the industry yet, and you need to start somewhere.
The key insight Fitzpatrick shares is this: the goal of cold conversations is to stop having them. You hustle together the first one or two from wherever you can, treat people's time respectfully, genuinely try to solve their problem, and those cold conversations start turning into warm intros. The snowball starts rolling.
Cold Calls
If you reach out to 100 people and 98 of them ignore you, what does that mean? It means you now have 2 conversations in play. That's it. Unless your entire business model depends on cold outreach, the rejection rate is irrelevant. You only need a few yeses to get the ball rolling.
One team successfully used cold LinkedIn messages to reach C-level executives at major UK retailers. They were ignored by practically everyone, but they only needed one "yes" to get started. And that one "yes" led to warm intros to others.
Seizing Serendipity
Beyond cold outreach, stay open to unexpected opportunities. Fitzpatrick shares a story about being at an engagement party and overhearing someone mention a speaking engagement. He walked over, started a genuine conversation about her career, and she ended up becoming his first committed alpha user.
The lesson? If you stop thinking of customer conversations as formal "interviews" and start thinking of them as genuine conversations about people's lives and problems, opportunities are everywhere. People love talking about their problems — by showing genuine interest, you become more interesting than 99% of people they've met.
Rule of Thumb: If it's not a formal meeting, you don't need to make excuses about why you're there or even mention that you're starting a business. Just ask about their life.
Find a Good Excuse
Sometimes you need a reason to start a conversation with a stranger. Fitzpatrick tells a great story about an entrepreneur who was building a product for cafe owners. He'd been hitting the pavement for weeks, getting turned away from cafe after cafe. The fix? Walking into a cafe and saying: "This coffee is amazing — I wanted to ask about the story behind the beans." Suddenly, the conversation was natural. The owner wasn't around, but the manager gave them the owner's contact details.
The trade-off with using an excuse is that it's hard to transition into a product or sales conversation later without revealing the initial deception. So think of these as one-time learning opportunities, not the start of an ongoing relationship.
The ultimate excuse? Having a PhD student on your team. "I'm doing research on X for my dissertation" opens almost any door. If you're really desperate, you can always say you're "writing a book" on the topic.
Rule of Thumb: If it's a topic you both care about, find an excuse to talk about it. Your idea never needs to enter the equation and you'll both enjoy the chat.
Immerse Yourself in Where They Are
This is one of the most underrated strategies. Instead of trying to find customers from the outside, go to where they already gather.
Fitzpatrick wanted to build tools for conference organisers and professional speakers. He didn't know any of the big names. So he hit the conference circuit and gave free talks everywhere he could. The speakers' lounge became his personal customer conversation machine. By immersing himself in the community, he met a load of people and had all the connections and conversations he could handle.
Interestingly, he ultimately decided that big speakers and big conferences were a bad customer segment and walked away. Not every conversation has to validate your idea — sometimes the most valuable learning is discovering what NOT to build.
Landing Pages
Joel Gascoigne did a classic landing page test with his startup Buffer. He described the value proposition and collected emails. But here's what most people miss: it wasn't the conversion rate metrics that convinced him to move forward. It was the conversations that resulted from him emailing every single person who signed up and saying hello.
Landing pages are a great way to collect qualified leads that you can then reach out to and have real conversations with. Paul Graham suggests a similar approach: get your product out there, see who seems to like it most, and then reach out to those types of users for deeper learning.
Get Clever
Every business is different, and sometimes you need a creative approach. One guy wanted to sell to top-tier universities like Stanford and Harvard. He needed to understand their problems and be taken seriously by decision-makers. His solution? He organised a semi-monthly "knowledge exchange" call between department heads of top universities to discuss shared challenges. By simply organising the call and playing host, he immediately absorbed all the credibility of the participating universities and got direct phone access to a pile of great leads.
The point is: don't just copy what someone else is doing. Consider your unique situation and get creative about how to manufacture conversations.
Bringing Them to You
When you're the one initiating conversations, you're always on the back foot. The other person is suspicious and trying to figure out if you're wasting their time. The better approach? Find ways to make them come to you. This saves time, reduces friction, and makes people take you more seriously.
Organise Meetups
For marginally more effort than attending an event, you can organise your own and benefit from being the centre of attention. Want to understand HR professionals' problems? Organise an "HR professionals happy hour." People will assume you're credible just because you're the one who sent the invite emails. It's the fastest and most unfair trick for rapid customer learning, and it also bootstraps your industry credibility.
Speaking & Teaching
Teaching is massively under-valued as both a learning and selling tool. If you're building better project management software, you probably have expertise and strong opinions about how things could be better. That's the magic combination for being an effective teacher.
Teach at conferences, workshops, through online videos, blogging, and by doing free consulting or office hours. You'll refine your message, connect with potential customers who take you seriously, and learn which parts of your offering resonate — all before you've even built it. Then simply chat up the attendees who are most keen.
Industry Blogging
Even if you have no audience, blogging about your industry is incredibly helpful. When Fitzpatrick sent cold emails from his blog email address, people would often meet with him because they had checked his domain, seen his industry blog, and figured he was an interesting person to talk to. The traffic and audience were almost irrelevant — the blog served as a credibility signal.
Blogging is also a great exercise for getting your thoughts in a row. It makes you a better customer conversationalist because you've already spent time thinking deeply about the industry's problems.
Creating Warm Intros
Warm intros are the gold standard. Conversations are infinitely easier when you get an introduction through a mutual friend that establishes your credibility and reason for being there.
7 Degrees of Bacon
The world is smaller than you think. Everyone knows someone. You just have to ask.
Fitzpatrick tells a story about a team of recent graduates who needed to reach McKinsey-style consultants. They were at a co-working space, so one of them stood on a chair and yelled: "Does anyone here know anyone who works at McKinsey? Can we talk to you for a second? We'll buy you a beer!" They bought three beers, had three quick chats, and left with a diary full of intros.
For consumer products, it's even easier — everyone knows a recent mom, an amateur athlete, or a theatre enthusiast.
Rule of Thumb: You can find anyone you need if you ask for it a couple of times. Kevin Bacon's 7 degrees of separation applies to customer conversations too.
Industry Advisors
Advisors can be a goldmine for intros. In his first company, Fitzpatrick relied heavily on 5 advisors who each had around half a percent of equity. Their main job was to make credible introductions. He met with each one once per month and got a fresh batch of intros weekly without it being a huge time burden for anyone.
You'd also be surprised by the quality of people willing to join your advisory board. The first conversation with a good advisor looks a lot like the first conversation with a flagship customer — you're both talking passionately about a space you care about. You can sometimes recruit great advisors directly from your early customer conversations.
Universities
If you're still in or recently out of university, professors are a goldmine. They get their grant funding from friendly, high-level industry folks, and since they're investing in research, those industry contacts are self-selected to be excited about new projects. Plus, professors are easy to reach — they post their emails publicly and you can generally just wander into their office.
Investors
Top-tier investors are awesome for B2B intros. Beyond their own rolodex and company portfolio, they can usually pull off cold intros to practically any industry. They can also help you close better advisors and directors than you'd be able to wrangle on your own. This applies to anyone who is a "big deal" and has already bought into your idea — always ask: who can they connect you to?
Cash in Favours
Remember all those people who brushed you off saying "Sounds great, keep me in the loop and let me know how I can help"? Now's the time to call in those favours. Reply to that old email and tell them you're ready for an intro to that person they know. Use the framing format from the next section to make their lives easy and reassure them you won't waste anyone's time.
You'll get ignored a lot, but who cares? You're not trying to minimise your failure rate — you're trying to get a few conversations going. Don't make a habit of it though, since it can burn bridges.
Asking For and Framing the Meeting
Sometimes a proper meeting can't be avoided — you need the full hour with someone senior. In those cases, how you frame the meeting request makes all the difference.
If you don't frame it properly, it becomes a sales meeting by default, which is bad for three reasons: the customer closes up about pricing, attention shifts to you instead of them, and it's going to be the worst sales meeting ever because you aren't ready.
The Five Key Elements
Fitzpatrick outlines a framework for requesting meetings that works incredibly well. The five elements are: Vision / Framing / Weakness / Pedestal / Ask
The mnemonic is: "Very Few Wizards Properly Ask [for help]."
- Vision — You're an entrepreneur trying to solve a problem or achieve a vision. Don't mention your specific idea.
- Framing — Set expectations about what stage you're at and, if true, that you don't have anything to sell.
- Weakness — Show vulnerability by mentioning a specific problem you're struggling with. This also clarifies you're not a time waster.
- Pedestal — Put them on a pedestal by showing how much they, in particular, can help.
- Ask — Explicitly ask for help.
Here's an example of what this looks like in practice:
"Hey Pete, I'm trying to make desk & office rental less of a pain for new businesses (vision). We're just starting out and don't have anything to sell, but want to make sure we're building something that actually helps (framing). I've only ever come at it from the tenant's side and I'm having a hard time understanding how it all works from the landlord's perspective (weakness). You've been renting out desks for a while and could really help me cut through the fog (pedestal). Do you have time in the next couple weeks to meet up for a chat? (ask)"
People like to help entrepreneurs, but they also hate wasting their time. This kind of opening tells them you know what you need and that they'll be able to make a real difference.
Once the meeting starts, you need to grab the reins quickly. Repeat what you said in the email and immediately drop into your first question. If someone else made the introduction, use them as a voice of authority. Have a plan for the meeting and be assertive about keeping it on track.
To Commute or to Call
One common shortcut is to move conversations to phone or video calls. Fitzpatrick is not a fan, and for good reason.
When you're in person, you get access to body language, facial expressions, and the natural rapport that comes from sharing a physical space. On the phone, people are trying to squeeze calls between other activities, wondering when they can hang up, and the whole thing ends up feeling more like a scripted interview than a natural conversation.
In-person meetings also have a huge advantage for building ongoing relationships. Nobody becomes friends over the phone. And those friendships are what lead to warm intros and future meetings.
That said, some experienced practitioners in the field do recommend phone calls, and they can work. But Fitzpatrick's advice is to start in person first. It's too easy to use phone calls as an excuse to skip the awkwardness of meeting someone face-to-face, rather than as a considered trade-off.
The Advisory Flip
This is a subtle but powerful mindset shift. Instead of going into conversations thinking "I need to find customers", think "I'm looking for industry advisors."
When you're looking for customers, you feel needy. You're on the back foot. You're basically asking: "Please buy my thing." But when you're looking for advisors, the whole dynamic flips. You're evaluating them. You're the one deciding if they're a good fit. Even if the topics you discuss are the same, both you and the other person will notice the difference.
This isn't about explicitly telling people you're looking for advisors (unless you already like them and it comes up naturally). It's about orienting your state of mind to give you a helpful internal narrative and consistent front.
The sales-advisor switch also puts you firmly in control of the meeting, since you're now evaluating them. You set the agenda, you keep it on topic, and you propose next steps.
How Many Meetings Do You Actually Need?
Every meeting has an opportunity cost. When you're travelling to that meeting, you aren't writing code or building your product. So how many conversations is enough?
The UX community says: keep talking to people until you stop hearing new information.
In practice, if your initial assumptions are mostly correct and you're in a simple industry, it might only take 3-5 conversations to confirm what you already believe. But you usually won't get that lucky. It often takes more until you start hearing a consistent message.
Here's a useful diagnostic: if you've run more than 10 conversations and the results are all over the map, your customer segment is probably too vague. You might be mashing together feedback from multiple different types of customers.
The goal isn't to have a thousand meetings. It's about quickly learning what you need, and then getting back to building. In most cases, you should be able to answer almost any question about your business or customers within a week.
Rule of Thumb: Keep having conversations until you stop hearing new stuff. If you're still getting wildly different answers after 10+ conversations, your customer segment is too broad.
Key Takeaways from Chapter 6
The goal of cold outreach is to stop doing cold outreach. Hustle the first few conversations, then convert them into warm intros.
Go where your customers already are. Conferences, meetups, online communities — immerse yourself in their world instead of trying to pull them into yours.
Make them come to you. Organise events, teach, blog. Being the host or the expert flips the power dynamic in your favour.
Warm intros beat everything. Ask your network, advisors, investors, and even previous contacts for introductions. Everyone knows someone.
Frame your meeting request properly. Use the VFWPA framework (Vision/Framing/Weakness/Pedestal/Ask) to get meetings without sounding salesy.
Start in person. Phone calls are a shortcut that often backfires. In-person conversations build better relationships and give you better data.
Flip your mindset. You're not looking for customers — you're looking for advisors. This one mental switch changes everything about how the conversation feels.
Know when to stop. Keep talking until you stop learning new things, then get back to building.
This is part of my series where I break down each chapter of The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick. If you're building a product and talking to customers, this book is essential reading.
Previously: Chapter 5 - Commitment and Advancement
Next up: Chapter 7 - Choosing Your Customers
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