Unscalable (But Pretty Cool) Sourcing Tactic

This reader email landed in my inbox … 👇

Here’s one thing that can work.

In fact?

It worked for me.

Let me tell you exactly what happened.

I hit a bug in a product that I really like. Made by a startup, of course 🙂

I opened a support ticket through their little chat widget 👇

Well, as luck would have it:

And as is the case with many early stage companies …

… the founder was on the other end.

So after I did a little debugging for them, and we sorted out the issue:

I put on my investor hat 👇

As you can see:

This wasn’t that hard.

3 steps, is all:

1. Use a startup’s product to solve a problem / do a job that you have
2. When it breaks, report it to one of the founders or the CEO — whether you know them or not.
3. If they respond positively, gently pitch yourself (like I did) and see if you can get a meeting with them.

Hey — this doesn’t always work.

In fact, there’s another startup that I’m totally fanboying over:

And their CEO doesn’t respond to my bug reports.

I’m not worried, though.

They’ll come around, eventually 😉

Because persistence pays off!