Where do I meet people from other industries to build software for?
I want to build a SaaS software product that someone will actually use. In order to do that, I need to meet people who have software needs, who is either an owner of a small business or have the power to make decisions for software used in their department.
Where do I meet these people?
I am an immigrant and not very sociable, even though I try to. Also, pretty much everyone I know works in tech.
Hi Na
I would strongly recommend checking out Toastmasters. There are clubs in most cities (usually more than one). The purpose of the club is to help members with public speaking and leadership. You can also learn highly valuable general communications, such as how to network. Club members are very helpful, and will encourage you to become more sociable.
Members often come from a business background, so you will get exposed to numerous domains just by chatting with fellow members. You can also attend regional and even national conferences, where you can meet dozens of people.
I have been a member for almost 8 years. I would recommend it to anyone. I got my first gig building custom software from a fellow Toastmaster!
Matt
It may also be worth finding and attending meetups geared towards audiences outside of tech. https://www.meetup.com/ has a lot
I did this (own a SaaS in the construction industry). I started by reaching out to people in my network. Chatting with them. Asking them what problems they have in their day to day business. Do this enough and patterns will start to emerge. People were happy to refer me to their friends / colleagues too. In person is the way to go here. Start looking for industry networking events in your area.
You can try to find the online places they hang out on.
There's probably a subreddit for the audience you're after. Find it, and start commenting and helping people as much as you can. Be known, then people will trust you and want to help you too.
Find some Twitter "influencers" of your area, then start interacting with them. You'll probably get some follows and impressions from your target audience, who follows these accounts.
Find meetups. Depends on where you live, there may be a meetup where your target audience hangs out. Try to find it and present yourself as someone with technical skills who wants to help them, they'll probably give you ideas.
I have not picked a field or an industry for which I want to write software for. Therefore, there is no audience or an area I can target.
Should I just try to meet random people and talk to as many of them as possible hoping that I'll meet someone? Do you know if there's a better strategy?
Find an industry you think you would enjoy serving. Spend some time figuring out where they hang out (as @m1guelpf mentioned). See what they are talking about and what their challenges are. Then decide if that is something you think you could and want to build something for.
I think launching a product is a lot like running a science experiment--you need to have at least some hypothesis (or multiple hypotheses) you've identified whether that's a hypothesis about an industry or user behavior or whatever. Then you should work to either quickly confirm or deny that hypothesis.
One of my recent examples of this:
I am a golfer, and I think on the whole, golf courses and golf course management companies are not really utilizing the best practices in web design, paid/targeted advertising, and optimizing the "checkout" experience for golfers. I only know about this industry as a consumer/golfer. But I don't know about it from the perspective of a course manager. So I reached out to 10 golf courses, and mentioned that I am a software product builder, an avid golfer, and while I think there is opportunity here, I'm interested in learning from them. I got on the phone with 3 of them and learned how they are thinking about digital marketing. That's a good starting point--but focusing on one hypothesis around an industry prevented me from wasting a lot of time with a lot of scattered calls/meetings.
Hope this helps!