

Ask News YC: Making connections - robmnl

Hello!<p>In an effort to meet new people and make meaningful connections for my startup, I'm looking to fly out to California a couple of times in the next three months.<p>I'm wondering where I'd go? Conferences? Hacker news meetup (when's the next one?)?<p>How do you make connections? How do you promote your startup other than on the internet?<p>Let me know, maybe I'll meet some of you guys :)
======
cperciva
Why do you need to promote your startup somewhere other than on the internet?

My (completely accidental) approach is:

1\. Spend four years being heavily involved in open source development
(FreeBSD in my case) and gain a reputation for producing really cool software
(both FreeBSD Update and Portsnap have elicited reactions of "how did we
manage to survive before this was available" from multiple sources).

2\. Announce that I'm working on a new project.

3\. Watch as emails flood in from users of my earlier works who are convinced
that whatever I'm working on right now has got to be the best thing since
sliced bread.

Of course, I haven't launched publicly yet, and I don't know how many these
enthusiastic people will end up paying to use my current project -- but it
certainly won't hurt to have an established reputation for doing cool stuff.

~~~
davidw
"Make something people want, for free"

"Then make something people want and ask money"

How'd you support yourself while working on the FreeBSD stuff, or did you get
paid to do it? Do you think the same people who liked your open source work
will turn tail at the thought of paying for software? Lots of them will,
likely, but do you have indications that some won't?

I agree though, open source is a good place to be for a variety of reasons.

~~~
cperciva
I started out doing FreeBSD work while I was a university student supported by
scholarships; but in 2006 I spent 4 months working on FreeBSD Update and
portsnap funded by donations from the FreeBSD community -- I sent out an email
saying approximately "here's the work I'd like to do; here's how long I think
it will take; here's how much I'd earn if I spent that time working at the
university; if people send me that much money, I'll spend the time working on
FreeBSD instead", and the money arrived.

Given that many of these people were willing to pay me to write open source
code, I'm sure that many of them will accept paying for online backups
(especially because of the unavoidable hardware costs).

------
utnick
\- <http://superhappydevhouse.org/>

\- <http://barcamp.org/> \- organize a news.yc meetup \- make friends on irc,
freenode, #facebook, #rubyonrails, etc, etc \- depending on how far along your
startup is you could probably try to set up some vc meetings

