There’s a version of networking that feels productive — coffees, LinkedIn DMs, founder events — and produces almost nothing. I did a lot of it in 2024. I got better at small talk. I collected business cards from people I never contacted again. I went home tired and called it work.
The problem wasn’t effort. It was that I had no real framework for what I was trying to get out of any given conversation. “Building relationships” is not a strategy. It’s a description of an activity that may or may not lead anywhere.
When I started building Fractional Tools in public, I needed to get more deliberate about this. Here’s what I changed.
The shift: outcome before conversation
Before any networking interaction now, I ask one question: what is the single most useful thing I could learn or get from this?
Not what I hope will happen. What specific thing — a warm intro, a validation of an assumption, feedback on pricing, a referral — would make this conversation worth one hour of my time?
If I can’t answer that clearly, I don’t schedule the meeting.
This sounds cold. It isn’t. It makes conversations better because you show up with real curiosity about a specific thing instead of vague hope that something useful will come up.
The three types of conversations worth having
After a lot of trial and error, I’ve organized my networking into three buckets:
1. Customer proximity conversations
These are conversations with people who are or could be customers. The goal is never to sell. The goal is to understand the problem better than they can articulate it themselves.
I do 4–6 of these per month. Each one has a specific question I’m trying to answer. Right now: “What’s the difference between a client relationship that renews and one that doesn’t?“
2. Operator-to-operator conversations
These are conversations with other founders or builders who are one to two years ahead of me. Not mentors — peers who are solving adjacent problems.
The goal here is pattern recognition. When someone who has already navigated a decision you’re facing tells you what they’d do differently, that’s compressed learning you can’t get anywhere else.
I try to have two of these per month. They’re usually the most valuable conversations I have.
3. Visibility conversations
These are conversations with people who have audiences or networks that overlap with my target market. A podcast interview, a guest slot in a newsletter, a joint post.
I used to resist these because they felt like self-promotion. I’ve reframed them: they’re how you build in public with distribution. Writing a good post that nobody reads is less useful than a slightly worse post that reaches the right 500 people.
The actual mechanics
A few things that made this concrete:
Weekly review. Every Monday I look at who I talked to last week and what I got from it. After two months of this, patterns become obvious — certain types of conversations consistently produce value, others don’t.
The one-ask rule. Every conversation gets one specific ask. Not “let me know if there’s anything I can help with.” A real ask: “Would you be willing to introduce me to [specific person]?” or “Can I send you three questions and get 15 minutes on a call?”
Follow-up within 24 hours. Not to “stay top of mind” — that’s the wrong frame. Follow up because if a conversation produced value, acting on it immediately is how you get compound value from it.
What building in public changes
The unexpected benefit of building in public is that it makes networking easier in a very specific way: you show up to conversations with context already established.
When someone has read even one thing you’ve written, the first 10 minutes of conversation aren’t spent establishing who you are and what you’re working on. You skip straight to what’s actually interesting.
That’s worth something. A lot, actually. It changes the quality of conversations with people you haven’t met yet, which is most of the people you should be meeting.