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Ask HN: Strategy for dealing with timewaste biz-dev meeting invites?
Lately I've been finding myself in conversations with people claiming they want to discuss a partnership between their company and one of my projects. As these partnerships sound good on paper, I take the meeting and we talk.
About halfway through some (not all!) of these meetings, my spidey-sense starts tingling, and I realize that either
a) This person does not have the authority to do the deal that was used to get me out here.
b) This person is really just trying to pitch me on their idea and the partnership thing isn't a two-way thing.
I like hearing about what people are working on and understand not every idea works out, so I'm not bugged too much when this happens, but I was wondering if people on HN had similar experiences and how they dealt with them. When I first started WindyCitizen.com, I was desperate to get anyone to listen to me and understand that feeling, but I'm pretty busy and my time is important. Someone getting me excited about a deal that's not really going to happen is frustrating and a waste of my time.
How do others handle these sorts of invitations? I'm half of a mind to start requiring some "proof of seriousness" before entering some of these discussions.
I'm also now of a mind to just disregard most if not all of these "let's work together" offers unless it's a clear "you pay me for X" or "I pay you for X."
- hcho 16y agoAsk them a bullet point list of what action points would they hope to set as a result of this meeting. Both for themselve and you. This will provide you with 2 defense lines: 1)They have to make an extra investment in this meeting. This will weed off the types who have a memorized pitch and dump on whomever they can find. 2)They will have to make their intention clear before the meetind. No bait and switch. This actually works for all types of meetings. I've seen a radical decrease in invitations and time spent at meetings,
- brandnewlow 16y agoThat's a great idea, thanks. "Send me some bullet points." is a great, hard-to-refuse response.
- bigohms 16y agoI generally tell them to summarize their offering in e-mail, with no guarantee of privacy. If its good enough and they're serious, they tend to invest in marking something up. I also ask for examples of business practices (things they've actually gotten accomplished). There is a ton of talk but little work these days... Nice job. I'm specing out a similiar concept for a different geo. Drigg & D6?
- brandnewlow 16y agoMore or less, yes.