Everyone in the room was just like me
WHY THE EVENTS AND GROUPS THAT FEEL MOST LIKE HOME ARE THE ONES COSTING YOU CLIENTS
There's a Slack you actually like where three hundred people who do roughly what you do, who get the joke, who know what a scope creep nightmare feels like without you explaining it. You're in there most days, you celebrate when someone posts a win, you rage a little when someone vents about a client who won't pay, you've been there. Here’s another meme.
In March you flew to the conference for people in your field and spent two days nodding, swapping tool recommendations, feeling, for the first time since you went solo, like you belonged somewhere. These are my people!!
You came home full of energy and passion! Business cards in your bag, three new follows, a draft post about how energizing it all was. And not one lead.
This is good! This is networking, you tell yourself. This is building a community. After the loneliness of working alone, finding your people feels like the opposite of a problem feels like a ice-cold beer in a summer day.
Coming out of isolation feels good, but when you start paying attention to the chats you had none of them actually brought your business forward. Rates. Tools. Which client ghosted who. The new AI thing everyone's scared of. Good talk, all of it, the talk of people in the same trench as you.
We keep doing this out of comfort. We spend way too much time inside rooms where not a single person could ever become a client. You went looking for buyers and found a mirror.
The rooms that feel most like home feel that way because they're full of people like you. People who speak your language, share your problems, understand your work without a pitch. Which is exactly why they will never hire you. They do what you do. It’s optimizing for the warm feeling of being understood, and calling it business development.
When something you're doing gets no traction, the instinct is to fix the thing you're saying. Usually the thing that's off is who's hearing it. Low traction can be a message problem, but often we are in the wrong saying the right things. Before you go to an event, join a community, before you rewrite a single word, ask whether the people in the room are buyers or just peers.
A backend developer who wants clients doesn't go to backend conferences, they go where the people who need backend developers are standing. You already know this when it's someone else's business, you forget it the second the room is warm and the snacks are good.
Your buyers' rooms are less comfortable, nobody there gets your jokes, you can't connect on shared context. There's no clean map for where they gather, and finding it takes a few wrong guesses and some honest looking. That discomfort is the price you have to pay, but it's also the sign you're finally in the right place.
If you can't say, off the top of your head, which rooms your actual clients gather in, that's the work, and it's worth doing before you book another conference that feels great and sells nothing.
Spend forty-five minutes with me mapping where your buyers actually are: go.ricardobrito.me.
The people who understand you and the people who pay you are almost never the same crowd. Stop confusing the welcome for the win.
In which ways are you confusing them?
