A step-by-step operational playbook for finding ten real people to have discovery conversations with. Week by week, channel by channel, with anti-thrashing rules built in.
The Ten Conversations piece makes the case for why you need to talk to real people before you build. This piece is the operational companion. How to actually find those people, what to say when you reach out, and how to keep yourself from thrashing between channels without making progress.
I needed this playbook myself. After years of building in isolation, the hardest part wasn't accepting that I needed to talk to people. It was figuring out where those people were, what to say to get them on a call, and how to stop switching tactics every three days when the first one felt slow.
So here's what actually works. Week by week. With specific time commitments and decision points built in so you don't mistake activity for progress.
You need two things nailed down before you do anything else. Skip this and every tactic in this guide becomes noise.
Who: A specific type of person, described precisely enough that you could recognize them in a room. Not "small business owners." Not "people who use AI." Something like: "freelance designers who manage more than five clients and are drowning in project handoffs." The narrower you go, the easier they are to find and the more useful the conversations will be.
Where: A specific place, online or offline, where at least ten of those people spend time. A subreddit. A Slack community. A LinkedIn search filter. A local meetup. If you can't name the place, your "who" is still too broad. Go back and slice again.
This is worth getting right. I wasted weeks messaging vaguely-defined people on channels where they didn't hang out. The problem wasn't the message. It was the aim.
This is designed around 30-45 minutes a day. You don't need to quit your job for this. You need a focused half hour and the discipline to do the same thing every day instead of switching tactics when it feels slow.
Goal: 3-4 conversations booked. Time: 30 min/day.
Warm intro request (to your connector, not the target):
LinkedIn DM (after engaging with their content for a few days):
Two things about these templates. First, use them as a starting point, not a script. The moment a message sounds templated, it gets ignored. Second, "happy to share what I'm learning" is doing real work. You're offering something back. That changes the dynamic from "give me your time" to "let's exchange."
Goal: 3 more conversations booked. Time: 30 min/day.
"so frustrated with" "[your problem area]" or "I wish there was" "[topic]". Engage on their posts for 2-3 days before DM-ing.Goal: Complete all 10 conversations. Make your Go/Pivot/Kill decision. Time: 30 min/day.
I built these because I know what I'd do without them: spend three days on LinkedIn, get impatient, switch to Reddit, spend two days on Reddit, discover a Slack community, spend a day there, decide cold email is probably better, draft a template, revise it four times, and end the week with zero conversations and five half-started channels.
That's the build trap applied to outreach. Same avoidance pattern, different material. You feel busy. You're not producing.
The rules:
This isn't a script. It's guardrails.
Open with their world, not yours. "Tell me about how you handle [problem area] right now." Then shut up. Let them talk. The first two minutes are warm-up. The real answers come at minute five, after the polished version runs out and the honest version starts.
Follow the energy. When they lean in, speed up, or get specific, you're close to something real. Ask "tell me more about that" and stay there. Don't rush to the next question.
Ask about behavior, not opinions. "What did you do last time this happened?" is ten times more useful than "Would you use a tool that does X?" People are terrible at predicting their future behavior. They're honest about what they already did.
Ask what they've tried. "Have you tried to solve this before? What happened?" This tells you what you're actually competing with. Usually it's not another product. It's a spreadsheet, a manual process, or ignoring the problem.
Ask about money. Not "would you pay for this?" Ask "what are you spending on this now?" Time is money too. "I spend three hours a week on this" is a budget, even if they don't think of it that way.
Do not pitch. If they ask what you're building, keep it to one sentence and pivot back: "I'm exploring building something in this space, but I'm still figuring out what the real problem is. That's why I'm talking to you." The moment you explain your solution, the conversation stops being discovery and starts being a demo.
Close with the referral ask. "This was really helpful. Who else do you know who deals with this?" Do not skip this. Do not feel awkward about it. They just gave you 15 minutes. Asking for a name is not a burden. It's a compliment: you're saying their world is the one you want to understand better.
Nothing fancy. A spreadsheet with these columns:
After ten conversations, read the "one-line summary" column top to bottom. The pattern will be visible. Not the pattern you expected. The real one.
It will feel slow. Especially in Week 1 when you've sent fifteen messages and gotten two responses. The build trap will whisper: you could be coding right now. You could be making progress on the product. This outreach thing is a waste of time. You should just build the thing and see what happens.
That whisper is the same voice that gave me 30 beautiful, unseen projects.
Two responses out of fifteen isn't failure. It's a 13% response rate, which is normal for cold outreach. Send fifteen more. Follow up with the thirteen who didn't respond. Ask your two respondents for referrals. The pipeline compounds. It just doesn't compound on Day 2.
The discomfort you feel reaching out to strangers is the same discomfort you'll feel launching, selling, and asking people to pay. This is practice. The product that survives is the one built by someone who learned to be uncomfortable in public, not just comfortable in the editor.
The playbook is three weeks. Not three weeks of thinking about it. Three weeks of doing it, 30 minutes a day, starting tomorrow. Put it on your calendar right now. The first message is the hardest. The second one is easier. By the fifth, it's just what you do before lunch.
Builder's Path is a public lab from Sellhausen AI Systems focused on AI-native building, validation, and product judgment.