The idea isn't going to show up at your desk
Day 12 of building in public.
I counted my calendar so far this week. Seven conversations that had nothing to do with an existing client, a signed deal, or anything I could point to and call “the plan.”
A coffee with a state government contact who’s been introduced around town as someone reinvesting his time in local builders.
A call with a VC and a well-known author about something they’re working on together.
An intro call with a founder building a talent platform. Another with a founder in the insights space.
A breakfast with two guys building something in the local game space.
A standing catch-up with a friend who’s building his own thing.
None of them were on my calendar because I had a plan for them. They were on my calendar because someone asked, and I said yes.
This is the part of “finding the idea” that doesn’t photograph well. It’s not a whiteboard session. It’s not a framework I ran once and got clarity from. It’s thirty-minute conversations, back to back, most weeks, most of which go nowhere specific. I don’t have a filter for who gets a yes right now. If someone wants to talk about what they’re building, I take the call.
I used to think that was inefficient. I still catch myself thinking it. There’s no dashboard that tells me which of these seven calls this week matters. Most of them probably don’t turn into anything I can point to in six months. But I’ve stopped needing each individual call to justify itself, because that’s not the unit that’s working.
The volume is the unit. Somewhere in the stack of unrelated conversations, patterns start to repeat: the same problem described three different ways by three different people, the same gap nobody’s filled, and the same question I keep getting asked that I don’t have a canned answer for. You don’t see that pattern in one good conversation. You see it in enough conversations that the noise starts to sound like signal.
Here’s the tactic, if you’re in the stage I’m in: stop waiting for the idea to arrive as a single clean insight. Book the calls. All of them, even the ones that seem unrelated to whatever you think you’re building. Say yes to the coffee with someone you don’t know yet doing something you don’t fully understand yet. The idea doesn’t show up in the room where you’re alone thinking hard. It shows up as an accumulation, and you don’t get to pick in advance which conversation has the piece you need.
The honest cost of this is that it’s exhausting in a way that’s hard to explain to someone who hasn’t tried it.
Every call is a small performance. Introduce yourself, explain what you’re doing, listen for the thread, decide in real time whether to pull on it. Seven times in a week. I don’t have a clean answer yet for how long I can sustain that pace, or when the volume tips from generative into just busy.
I just know that right now, it’s the only method I’ve found that’s actually working, and sitting alone with a notebook wasn’t.
Foley