build the door

networking always made me a little queasy. the cold messages, the coffee chats engineered to extract a referral, the sense that you're performing interest to get something. i'm not above it exactly, it just never sat right, and it never reliably worked for me either.

the alternative i keep coming back to is to build the door instead of knocking on it. make something so clearly good that it does the talking. a real artifact, public and measurable, that someone in the field sees and thinks, i want to know who made this.

make work too good to ignore instead of asking to be let in.

this isn't a trick to avoid people, it's a better way to meet them. an artifact starts the conversation on the strongest possible footing, because the proof is already on the table. you're not asking to be believed, you've already shown the thing.

it only works if the work is real, which loops back to everything else: you have to actually ship it, and it has to come from the judgment layer, where the output is hard to fake.