Andrew:	You're watching the Introverts Guide to Networking led by Ruben Gomez. He is the founder of BidSketch where website designers can go to create customized, clean proposals minutes. I'm Andrew Warner; I'll help lead the session. I'm the founder of Mixergy.com proven entrepreneurs. Ruben, do you have an example of what our audience will be able to do at the end of this session?

Ruben:	You're going to be able to learn how to meet and build relationships with people that can dramatically improve your business.

Andrew:	'Dramatically improve your business' is important. So is knowing that we're addressing introverts here. Let's see an example of how you improved your business because you connected with someone you might not have had access to before.

Ruben:	When I first launched BidSketch one of the things I was having problems with was that I was having a lot of people cancel on me early on. And I couldn't figure out why. I kept emailing them and asking for feedback and trying all sorts of things but nobody would respond to me and it was just incredibly hard to get feedback. I explained this to [??] who advised me to actually add this little comment box here and make it required so that anybody who was cancelling would have to fill it out and tell me why they were cancelling. I was a little bit scared about it. He said, 'Don't worry about it. Nobody will have a problem with it.' I put it in, tried it out for a week and he was right. I got great feedback, nobody had a problem with it and because of this box I've been able to increase my conversions from [??] to maybe 10%; from 50% to 60%.
 
Andrew:	From 50% to 60% more people who try your stuff now are signing up. And the reason of course is if you get people to tell you why they're cancelling and you address the issues that they're telling you about future people won't have those issues and won't want to cancel. There's advice and support and help from someone you just met online; you being an introvert, him being... Let's take a look at his website. The founder of KISSmetrics, a site that's designed to help company increase conversions and get more sales. You went directly to the top and you got help. People who watch this are going to see you on camera with me and they're going to say, 'The guy doesn't seem like an introvert. Anyone who's on camera at all isn't an introvert.' But you were and you still are, despite this, you're doing this as a favor to me and to my audience. 

Ruben:	Even doing this right now is difficult for me. It's hard. The only reason I can do it is because you're a friend so I feel somewhat comfortable but I'm definitely an introvert. I'll give you an example. The very first conference that I ever went to I was excited about because there were going to be a bunch of people like me, geeks, and it was a conference in Orlando. I went out and spent a lot of money on business cards, a fancy business card folder. I went out there with 500 people. It was a three day conference and I didn't have a single conversation, I didn't shake one person's hand, I didn't hand out one business card the whole time at the conference.

Andrew:	I'm not an introvert but I so identify with that because I was like that at one time in my life. I would go to the conference, not know how to talk to people and find excuses to do emails in my room thinking that I was actually being productive. Meanwhile I was missing out on people like [??] KISSmetrics who helped you and multiple others who we'll get to know about throughout this session. I know the person who's watching us right now is identifying a little bit with this, maybe even more that I was, and now they're saying, 'What's the first step that I take?' What do they need to know? What's the first thing you can tell them that they can see results from?

Ruben:	The every first thing is they need to learn how to use email properly. A lot of this communication is going to be taking place through email. This is about, most of the time, meeting people online. As an introvert it's just easier to do it that way and you're not always near people. Meeting people online means you're going to use email and you have to use email properly.

Andrew:	Before the session we were thinking maybe what you should do is go to your Gmail account and just keep showing these different emails that you personally send out but we realized it was going to take too long and it's going to be too distracting to show that, so you copied and pasted emails in preparation for this conversation. But this is a real email that you sent to Noah Kagan, the founder of AppSumo. 

Ruben:	Yes. 

Andrew:	Just copied and pasted. 

Ruben:	Yes. This is actually the very first email that I sent to Noah. 

Andrew:	Yes. 

Ruben:	This is a real email. Also, right below that I have an email that I sent to Jason Cohen, the first email that I sent to him. But, if you notice something about these emails they're both really short, right? And they have two elements that I think are really important when you're sending out an initial email. 

So, they both have a compliment, and they have some feedback. So, as an example, the very first email here. It says, 'I just wanted to let you know a couple of things since I'm a big fan of what you're doing with AppSumo'. So right there, I'm a big fan of what you're doing with AppSumo. I'm just saying that I really like what he's doing. Then, I give him feedback on an email that he had just sent out that wasn't working, right? 

Andrew:	So it's always . . . and I've seen this and you and I have talked about this, your format is that simple. It's short email, compliment first, feedback later. 

Ruben:	Yes, for an initial or if something just happened that I really like. Then I usually follow it up with lots of feedback; we'll talk about that. 

Andrew:	So why . . . I guess I understand the compliment because if you say something nice about my work it's something that I spend all day on; I care a lot about it and if I see someone who is appreciative of it, who compliments it, you just have now showed attention to the thing that I care most about. I get that. 
But why feedback? Why not follow up with an, 'Hey, we should get together for drinks or, hey, do you want to just chat on the phone. Or I really dig the fact that you're trying to lower prices at AppSumo. Can we hang out sometime at a conference'. Why is specifically feedback the first entry point for you? 

Ruben:	Because it's . . . personally, first of all, it just feels awkward to, for me, to . . . I am an introvert; it feels very awkward for me to just immediately ask for a meeting or anything like that. So, personally I have trouble with that. But, you have to think about them as well. So, if somebody just emails you out of the blue and you don't know who they are and they ask for your time like this, how likely are you to give it to them? How likely are you to have time? These guys are really busy, so, you want to build a relationship first and helping . . . giving feedback is helping. So helping, and starting to help, even if it's in small ways is, I think, one of the best ways to do it. 

Andrew:	Yes. And I can see, for example, I know . . . I'm assuming that the time that you sent that email to Noah is when he was just getting AppSumo going; when the rest of the world wasn't so sure that it was going to be the site that it became. And you said, look, the email you're sending out has got a bunch of markup in it and it's going into my spam folder. If he's now alerted to a problem that he might not have known about before, it's clearly money in his pocket because you're helping him solve the biggest source of revenue for him, which is email, in his case. 

And if you're helping someone by giving them feedback that actually helps improve their business, it's like you're taking cash out of your pocket and handing it to them. Or cash out of thin air, essentially, and handing it to them. 

So it's short email, compliment, feedback. That's the introduction. That's the way that you recommend people do it. What's the next step? What's the next thing that people need to keep in mind? 

Ruben:	Sure. The very next step, I would say, would be to send frequent emails. So, it's not enough to just send one email and then email them a couple of months later or never again and hope that they're going to email you back and you're going to have built a relationship. That's not going to happen.

So, you want to make sure to send a lot of email, basically. You want to be remembered. You don't want to be spammy about it. You don't want to just send everyday just because. You want to have real reasons to send email. You just want them to remember your name. Most importantly, you want to build a relationship. Building a relationship online is just like building a relationship offline. The more you meet somebody, the more you talk to somebody, the better you get to know them and the more comfortable you feel with them. 

Andrew:	So, what are we looking at here? It looks like subject lines and dates of emails. Who are these to? 

Ruben:	These are all emails to a good friend of mine, Rob Walling. 

Andrew:	He's now a good friend of yours, but he's a person whose blog you were reading for a long time, who you were benefiting from as you were building your business, but because of these emails, you became friends.

Ruben:	Exactly. These are the very first emails that I had sent Rob. At this time I didn't know Rob. I just went back and pulled the very first emails just so you can see how frequently I sent emails. Some of these are just a continuation of the same thread. You can see it's almost at the beginning maybe once a week and there a couple threads. It's just back and forth right?

Andrew:	Yep. It just builds up and by February it looks like your "besties", the way that you're emailing back and forth by February 12.

Ruben:	I actually looked after that, he starts sending me emails. It's a way for them to remember and start building the relationship. It's probably good to mention right here, at the very beginning I actually emailed them with a question and he replied back and talked quite a little bit. Then after that, a week later, a little bit after a week later, you see this update? Subject line right here? I emailed him back not just to say, not to just frequently email, but to, actually I had a reason I was updating him on something we talked about.

Andrew:	All right. Let's come back and talk about that in a little bit because I know that's an essential part of the way you build relationship and show the person that you're talking to that you're not just hanging out. You're not just a fan, but you're someone who gets stuff done. For now the point that we want to make sure to emphasize, is you're saying frequent contact, short emails, but frequently.

As an introvert, as someone who's not a friend of a friend of Rob's, you might be hesitant to email again. You might say, he didn't respond to my first email or my second email. I'm going to just disappear. He doesn't like me, I'm talking now about the way I would react to that, I don't want to put words into your mouth, but I could imagine. You're saying, don't just keep sending it out there frequent, small, helpful, and build that relationship. We're going to show how to escalate the relationship, but first frequency is important.

Ruben:	Right. Going back to the first thing I mentioned on the first point about short emails, you can feel better about sending emails if they're short. Sometimes like I said, they're busy, they get a lot of emails. They may miss your emails, forget to respond it doesn't mean they never will, it just means that you're going to send them another email with something helpful hopefully next time, right?

Andrew:	Yep. OK. So, what's the next tactic?

Ruben:	The next one is giving feedback. That's really important because we discussed it a little bit in the beginning, but it's all about helping the other person. One of the best ways to help is to -- and the easiest, is to just give feedback. Every body can give feedback. It's extremely important to give feedback. Some of the best times to give feedback are when the person you're giving feedback too is involved in the project or involved in something. It's really important, at that point in time -- and that's when they're most open to feedback and that's when you want to do a good job and give them thorough feedback on that.

Andrew:	Now we're saying, you've gotten the relationship going, now it's time for the big help. This is where you know they're at the stage of where they really need help and you're not just coming in with a little bit of support, you're saying, your going through something big I'm going to give you a big hand right now.

Ruben:	Yeah and at that point of time is, I think some of the times where you start to really [??] the relationship. When you start to offer help or give [??]. Especially, if you give it automatically without asking. I think some people are weird about it. I'm sending out emails that give great feedback is a good way.

Andrew:	 What you're doing here, actually before we even get to this I care about results, results, results in all of these sessions. I want to keep emphasizing the results that you got with Rob Walling. He showed you a plan for launching your product that enabled you to get sales quickly when you launched it, right? You and I talked about how you got sales after you launched your software.

Most people it takes them awhile to get customers in the door. He helped you when you needed it. Noah Kagan recently ran an [??] promotion for your company and helped get you customers. I know both of them have appreciated help that you've given them in the past and I want to emphasize that you're not just here to hang out, you are in business this isn't just about how to make friends, this is about how to build real relationships that help both of your businesses and by the way, along the way, make friendships. So, now I talked about the results. You've shown the e-mail. I recognized this e-mail when you sent it to me in the notes and preparation for the session. The e-mail that you sent me was incredibly helpful. This is when I launched the Mixergy Premium program, where I started charging, and I had all kinds of prices on that. I'll let you explain what you were doing. 

Andrew:	Yes, I remember this. You had just lost the [??] program, and it seemed like you were getting a lot of grief from people. There was something on Hacker news where they were talking about you charging for content. Basically, everybody expects it to be free. You seemed to be kind of concerned about that. You asked for feedback, and you were testing it out. So, it was obviously pretty important. It was a big step in what you were doing. So, essentially, I find out. And then, right after I did that, I sent you an e-mail of three bullet list items, but I wanted to make them really helpful. So, basically, the first one I talk about which one I picked and why I picked that. 

One of the important things about giving feedback is not just saying, "OK, this is broken," or "I did this, and this happened," but actually explaining why and letting the other person see your mindset. This is pretty helpful. So, that's what I tried to do in the first one, explain what I picked, why I picked it, and what else I would've done. The second one, I sort of went through some of the negative comments that were happening on Hacker News and just said, "Ignore those," because there are people like me that don't think that way. 

Ruben:	Let me pause right there, and let me tell you where my mind was when I got that e-mail. I was living in Argentina at the time, and I didn't even know that we went live with the paid version of the site, so it took me by surprise that we had. The out-sourcer who I was working with, not the guy who's editing the interview, but one of the out-sourcers I was working with put it out much faster than I expected, and I started to see people complain all over the place, and I thought, maybe I shouldn't be doing this. I started calling up friends back in the U.S., getting their feedback, trying to understand should I do it or not. And I was in this uncertain place, and it was you, it was Patrick McKenzie, it was Ramit Sethi, it was maybe a couple of others, who said keep going. 

And as a result of that, all of the other noise just disappeared in my head, and I thought, all right, I'm going to do it. But you guys came through and pushed me at a time when I was really unsure of myself. I could name the people who did that, and I can tell you that this is much more powerful to me looking at this now in retrospect than it can be for the audience. I just want to communicate to them. These aren't just a bunch of words on a screen. Take this for the powerful message that it is, coming from Reuben. The other one is Jason Fried, from 37signals. I'll never forget the e-mails that you guys sent. I'll never forget the way that he told me to keep going, because it came in as useful feedback at a time when I was just trying to figure out what to do. All right, and then you had one last message there. I'll let you read that and explain what you were telling me.

Andrew:	Basically, the last one was just about telling you that you could have charged more if you wanted to. And then I gave an example of when I moved up my pricing what happened. Certain people complained, people will always complain, and all that stuff. It was just letting you know a little bit more about what I've gone through and maybe hoping that might help your situation in this case.

Ruben:	Yeah. And you're saying, look, increasing pricing is actually a helpful thing. And I got that form a couple of experiments that I did, where if I increased prices, I ended up with more orders, believe it or not.

Andrew:	Right.

Ruben:	All right, and you're showing the second e-mail there, too.

Andrew:	Right. So, this one is to Peldi of Balsalmiq Mockups. This was really early on when he launched myBalsalmiq, when it's still in beta. You could see, this one's a pretty long e-mail, right? And so, a page is the e-mail, and what's not part of this page is three screenshots that were marked up. So I just went through and basically talked about the stuff that I felt was confusing about the user interface and added screen shots, to make it easy to see some problem areas. Then after that, I ended it by talking about the things that I really like about it because it's also important -- especially if you're beta testing something that a lot of people just basically just send negative feedback, but it's really important to let them know what's working right. What they're doing right.

Andrew:	[??], one of the most admired [??] software creators online, when I did an interview with you earlier this week I posted it. He started promoting it to his audience and it helped become one of the most popular [??] of the month. Because he has a very passionate audience, beyond that though how has he helped you?

Ruben:	Several times. Early on when I quit my job, I was so stressed out about it and I didn't know what to do, he's giving me advice on several points, which has been very helpful, but this was extremely great advice. Because I was so stressed out, I wanted to give a month notice, maybe even two months notice. He said, 'Don't do that just give them two weeks notice and if they really work something out whatever you'll thank me later that you did.' I gave two weeks notice and within two days I knew that he was right. That was great feedback.

Andrew:	Good. I want to keep emphasizing the power of what you're doing here. I think a lot of times people look for simple solutions, like a set of pickup lines for how to meet entrepreneurs. I would be able to sell a ton of these courses if I said, 'Ruben's going to tell you the 20 lines that you can use to meet the top entrepreneurs and get them to mentor you.' It's not about that. It's about this interaction. It's not as gimmicky as that, it's about really helping people and in return really getting support and help back from them.

Ruben:	Yeah. Some of these things may seem like, OK you can send out a simple email and get that kind of feedback, which maybe let's say if you ask the question about how long to quit. Maybe you can, but [??] it takes up a lot more of your time than that. He helped me think through my product road map.

Andrew:	[??] did?

Ruben:	[??] did, right. 

Andrew:	[??] help you think through your product road map?

Ruben:	Well, he actually talked about the fact that people were emailing me and asking me for product road map and he said, 'Why don't we just trade product road maps. Let's draft up an email.' We discussed our product road maps and then drafted up really long emails. That kind of stuff takes time. Rob spent a lot of time. Noah just recently helped me take my emails, this was through a lot of time and a lot of emails going back and forth, helped me increase my email signups from like five a month to 15 a day.

Andrew:	He's good that way, but I've also seen people get emails from Noah and he says great, cool, and moves on because he doesn't have time to help people out. What's the next tactic?

Ruben:	The next thing is following up. What do you want to follow up? Following up is super powerful. It's great because hardly anybody follows up. Nobody does this so, it's really a great way to stand out and be remembered. Like I said, a lot of times people will email people like this, so you want to do what you can to be remembered, and stand out and let them know that you're different. That you actually get stuff done.

Andrew:	OK. So when Heaton says, actually tell me the back story behind that email to Heaton? What is that?

Ruben:	I was writing a guess host and I'd asked Heaton some questions. I'd sent him an email telling him that I was going to mention [??] and then I followed up with a couple of questions. My questions were short, but he actually responded back with, he put time into his answers. So this was just following up to let him know that he didn't waste his time by answering my questions. That yes, I went ahead and published that, included that into the guest post, which is going to get thousands of visitors and hopefully some conversions out of it. 

Andrew:	And, you did the same thing with me? 

Ruben:	Right. I think I had asked you about a pay-with-a-tweet experiment that you did and then you sent back an e-mail, a really nice e-mail that had some great stats and information on there. I said "Wow". I was really impressed. So, I went back, and this is key, whenever I ask a question or try to get advice and get it I make it a to-do item. It's very important for me to do that, so I can then have something to e-mail the person back with. After you sent back that information I didn't just say "OK. Cool. You did pay-with-a-tweet and this is what happened. I'll try it some day." Right? No, I went back to my site and I actually started a test. After a couple of weeks I mailed you back, "Hey, Andrew. I tried it out and this is a summary of what happened. I attached a screen shot showing my funnel."         

Andrew:	I love that. That taught me so much. I'm glad that I helped you before hand, but what you sent me back felt really valuable to me. What you showed me was, "Here's how I think about this kind of process." You said, "Andrew, I did the pay with the tweet. Pay-with-a-tweet is you were offering something for free, but it wasn't 100% free. People had to tweet about your freebee in order to get it for free for themselves, so, they tweeted then they entered your funnel by giving you their e-mail address and some of them ended up buying. What you showed me was that you don't see all e-mail addresses the same, that you don't at the end of a campaign say 'I got 100,000 e-mails or 100 e-mails. Yay.' You say, 'How many of those e-mails converted into orders and if I didn't get enough then it's not worth my time.' That process showed me so much."

Ruben:	I didn't know whether you'd get anything out of the e-mail that I was sending. I was hoping you did or I was hoping some of the information might be helpful, but it was just a short follow-up with showing that, how I think about the process. 

Andrew:	I've got something in my notes here about follow-up.cc to talk about that in this section. I think we need to tell the person who's watching us now about follow-up.cc, to talk about that in this section. What do we need to tell the person about follow-up.cc? 

Ruben:	So, one of the things that I do whenever I talk to people is I try to come up with something that, basically, if I'm asking for help, I'm going to do something and I'm going to make it a to do what. Right? So, in the past, and I still do this, I added it to my to do list. Another thing that I do is...
 
Andrew:	That's your Gmail design, by the way, the ninja. 

Ruben:	Yeah. I forget that not everybody has this, but I used a service called follow-up.cc to remember to follow up. So, let's say that this is an e-mail thread that I just had with somebody. So, now it's going to be an action item. I'm going to probably implement this in a week, so I would just forward this to...

Andrew:	I see. So, we're pretending that someone just sent you a message with a great suggestion. You then do what? 

Ruben:	So, then I go to forward and then I type 1W. I send it and that's it. So, a week later I get an e-mail that looks just like this in my inbox. The only thing that this e-mail is is just a reminder. 

Andrew:	You're basically getting that same e-mail back a week later with, on the right side, is a way for you to snooze it, so if you're not ready to handle it right now you could hit the "snooze 30 minutes" and it comes back in 30 minutes. But, what it's doing is reminding you to follow up with this person. 

Ruben:	Exactly. 

Andrew:	The way I use it, by the way, is if I were e-mailing, that's Marissa there, if I e-mailed Marissa and said "Thanks for the great suggestion I would in the BCC[Sp] field type in 1W@follow-up.cc, and that way, a week later, it comes back to me. It's really helpful. 

Ruben:	Yeah. I do that a lot too, but sometimes I don't. I'm not sure that I'm going to come away with an action item so I'll just forward the e-mail then. 

Andrew:	Do you have follow-up.cc open on your screen? Maybe what you could do is hit the one day snooze or something and we can take a look at follow-up.cc on the screen. I just want to show people what we're suggesting that they check out.

That's a confirmation. You did snooze for one day. And then hit the Home button, let's just show the Home screen. I want to be as visual as possible in these sessions.   

Now you're editing it and there it is.

So, that's why I forgot. I want to show people there is a free version of it and they can just go and sign up. 

We have no connection with followup.cc. I know a lot of other people swear by Boomerang and other services that work really well. The general idea though it is that you send yourself a reminder so you know to follow up with them. 

We talked before the session about how we want to focus this on introverts. Because we want to be really useful to one group of people, not a little use to a lot of people. We also said that we wanted to focus on online connections. But we thought that it would be incomplete if we left it at just online.    

And so we talked about maybe one way that an introvert can make connections with really great people offline and you did something really interesting at a conference recently. Can you talk about that?

Ruben:	So it was at MicroConf. My friend Rob was putting on MicroConf, and I volunteered to help out with MicroConf.  

Basically you can see from the speaker lineup there were a lot of interesting people here, that you want to meet. 

So what I did was, I volunteered to video tape the conference and that way I got to actually go to this speaker dinner, even though I wasn't a speaker. And got to sit there and talked to pretty much everybody and meet everybody that way.  

So as an introvert, it gave me a really good excuse to do that.  

Andrew:	I noticed that actually. One of the things that I'm learning about conferences is that, there are these clicks and the speaker end up often in their own little click. And they have the dinner, they have these private conversations. And as a person who is there at the dinner, they get to know who you are. What are you doing here, what is your part here? As a person who is a volunteering at the event, you naturally are called on to interact with the guest and with the speakers and it's a great way to connect with them. 

And that's what you did at MicroConf.

How did you, did Rob volunteer you or did you volunteer yourself to help out?   

Ruben:	I volunteered to help out at whatever needed. Because it sounded like there's going to be a lot going on at the conference. I said, 'You know what, if you need help any kind, doesn't matter, like putting badges together, whatever just, you know, I'm there, I can do it'. And then he followed up, he said, 'Yeah, actually there might be this one thing'. So, it was pretty straight forward.      

And another thing about meeting people at a conference, I mean, I always try to go to conferences, that's where there are people that I kind of know online, but never met them in person. And it's so great to meet people like that in person, really help take the relationship to the next level. One of the best things that you can do. 

Andrew:	What a big change from the time you went to the conference with business cards and didn't get to meet anyone. Here you are at a conference where, first of all, you knew a lot of these people, I'm seeing their faces up there. Of course you know Rob is on the upper right, next to him on his left is Noel Kagan, who you mentioned earlier. Then you see Ethan Shaw, and as I looked around here, I see other faces of people who you know now and many you knew before.

And it is a big change and it is because of what you've done online.  

Ruben:	Yeah. I see that if I haven't know anybody online, if I haven't reached out to them online, it probably would be similar to that very first conference I went to. I didn't know anybody, so it's just a roomful of people that I'm meeting for the very first time. 

Where as here, I've actually, I already know these people, I had conversations and now it's just meeting them in person, which is great.      

Andrew:	All right. There's still other tactics that we wanted to get to. At least one other one. 

You want to bring that up on your screen? 

Ruben:	Sure, Warm emails.  

Well, so, what I mean by warm emails is asking for referral, for an introduction, to somebody. Not just asking for one, but also giving introductions. I think it's valuable to do both and it's important to do both. The reason why asking for an introduction is helpful is because there are a lot of people that are very hard to reach and one of the easiest and best ways to reach them is through somebody else that they know. In here, I haven't actually asked Noah to introduce me to somebody from Smashing magazine. 

And this is the thing with you and Noah and a lot of people I know, you guys are so good at offering introductions without me saying anything about it. It happens all the time. He's offered to introduce me; I haven't taken him up on that just yet. But if I did this is how I would basically ask for an introduction. 'Hi, Noah. Is there somebody at Smashing Magazine you can introduce me to? I have a couple of possible guest posts I'd like to run by them.' And that's it. Just two sentences. I'm doing this at this point in time because I know him already. So it's not just like asking somebody that I don't know for an introduction to somebody else that I don't know.

Andrew:	What I understand about human psychology is not a whole lot but I do know if you don't ask for something in return, ask for something even a little big you create a relationship that's lopsided and you create an expectation in the other person that they're to never offer you anything because by you helping them you're getting all the benefit that you need and it creates bad expectations. 

I've even heard of con artists just asking for small things as a way of getting you trained to give them big things because they know if they don't ask for small things you're not establishing a relationship where the other person feels comfortable and feels ready to help out. Probably shouldn't use 'con artists' as an example in these sessions but the basic idea is these requests for help are sometimes tough to ask for but they're really nurturing to a relationship. I know Noah if you sent that out would be happy to make that kind of introduction. And of course the person who he'd connect you with, because it's Noah and because he's offered to make the introduction, would be much more receptive to responding.

Ruben:	He's already made so many introductions without me asking. That's a good point about asking for things and not letting it be just a one-sided relationship. It's just like a regular relationship, right, even if all this is taking place online. I read that a tactic to get people to like you is to ask for small favors. It's kind of counter-intuitive. Doing things, sure that helps. But actually asking for favors helps as well.

Andrew:	I agree. You're right. It's easier via email. It's easier if it starts off small like an introduction. That's how you get to meet people. You've got an email up there that I remember. I like, by the way, how you're thinking about this. You're saying, 'The audience here knows Andrew. I'm going to show them how I did this stuff with Andrew.' There is the email you sent me asking for actually...introducing me to Rob.

Ruben:	This is actually doing an introduction. Once you actually start to get to know a couple of people then one of the other things you could do to advance your relationship, and this is about building relationships so it's basically introducing people that might want to know each other. In this case I'm introducing Andrew to Rob Waller. Rob was putting on a conference. I'd asked Andrew about speaking at the conference; he said he'd like to talk about it with Ron. Introduction emails or something that  initially I had a really tough time with because the very first time I had to do it, how do I write one? I had no idea. After a while seeing other people that do it all the time do introductions it's basically a very simple thing. Just a couple lines where I say, 'Andrew, meet Rob.' And then talk about who he is, what he's done. 'He's putting a conference together called [??] and was interested in talking to you about it and you can take it from here.' That's it.

Andrew:	Can we give everyone who's watching this a copy of all the emails you've used so that they can...maybe we'll strip out the email addresses from them so you're not revealing other people's e-mails, but, can we give them these documents so that they can use them as guides when they're sending out e-mails?   

Ruben:	Absolutely. Sure. 

Andrew:	Great. 

Ruben:	And, a lot of times you might add another line on here, like, "Rob" or "Andrew is..." to sort of complete that. Some people do that as well. The point here is to keep it short. You're just doing a quick intro and letting them take it from your introduction. 

Andrew:	The other thing that you and I talked about before that we don't really have a named tactic for but is important to talk about is how you kind of mimic. You take it from there. Tell the audience about that.

Ruben:	So, I think it's important to be reflective of the communication style that you're dealing with, so, however somebody talks, just like in person, you want to sort of talk the way that they talk and sort of have the same body language that they have. In e-mail it's similar. You want to reflect the way they communicate online. If they use exclamation marks and smiley faces it wouldn't hurt to add one to your e-mail. If they don't and they're kind of monotone they might think you're a little weird if you have all these smiley faces and exclamation marks and all that stuff, so, you probably want to tone down your communication style a little bit.   

Andrew:	OK. Finally, you say "get involved with or start side projects". 

Ruben:	Yes. That's very key for people that are introverted to do things like that because, for me at least, it gives me an excuse to talk to people. It is hard to just e-mail people that I don't know, so just getting involved in projects is a really great way to give me an excuse to talk to people. 

Andrew:	Can you give me an example? 

Ruben:	Sure. We talked about one example which was the conference. Another example was the guest post. So, this is a guest post that I did. Because of this guest post I interviewed three people or four people as part of the guest post. I even e-mailed you, Andrew, about the guest post. I said, 'Hey, [??] include a Mixergy clip where Jason Fried was talking about free plans and all that stuff. But, that gave me an excuse to talk to you and Hiten Shah. This is actually how I met Justin Vincent from Techzing, and we're good friends now because of a project that I got involved in. I e-mailed him. I asked him for an interview because I was writing guest posts and I wanted to talk to him about some other things. He replied back and said sure. We talked on Skype and we had a nice conversation from that.  

Andrew:	I don't remember you asking me about that, but I do remember reading that as a fan of Rob's work. Look at how many tweets that post got. He must have loved it. But, it was also a really well written case for not offering free plans.  

Ruben:	Yeah. Thanks. It did way better than I thought it would. I was hoping that it would get at least one comment. That was my goal. 

Andrew:	I think it's the most viewed article on his site. Right? When you go to the list of the most popular posts on his site it's up there. There it is. I knew it. That's how carefully I've watched that one. So, you're saying to get involved in side projects. Even guest blogging means that you have an opportunity to talk to new people and you certainly have an opportunity to talk to new people and you certainly have an opportunity to get to know the person who you're guest blogging for. You also say beta testing fits in to this. What do you mean by that? 

Ruben:	That's how I started talking to Hiten Shah. He had just launched his metrics and they were doing beta testing, so I signed up for beta testing and it gave me a great chance to e-mail really detailed feedback, offered to give more feedback on the phone, on Skype...

Andrew:	And, you got on the phone on Skype with him. As long as you have his metrics on screen, let's bring up that tab. Let's keep this stuff really visual. So, yeah, you got on the phone with him and you were walking through your feedback to him? 

Ruben:	Yeah, I think I might have offered him Skype, but he's really big, or he was, on the phone, so he offered to speak on the phone, and I said, sure, let's talk on the phone. Actually, he wanted to know a couple of the problems that I was having, just with my business, because it helped him with metrics and then in return, I told him some of the things that I liked about his metrics, and all that stuff, so we had at least a couple of phone conversations. Yeah, just getting involved in little projects like that, like I emailed somebody about writing an e-book. Somebody from the [??] network of sites. Just a project that I didn't even consider. So I emailed the guy that runs the site and it's pretty big and popular in the design space. He emailed back, that's a great idea, and he was really excited because we've been trying to write something like that but don't have the time to do it or anything like that so, yeah, if you do it just let me know and I'll help you promote it to our network of sites and off of that we've actually had several email exchanges. 

Andrew:	Well, it's the several that I want to make sure to emphasize. When you publish anything online or you start a business, there's always someone who, there's always people who help you out a lot and you say, boy there was that one guy that really helped me and I can't think of his name. There's one guy that really came through. I can't think of his name, but man, the universe is a great place for sending people like him. You don't want them building a relationship with the universe, though it's great. You want them to get to know you and that frequency and that it doesn't always have to be this big long document but that it can just be a hey, I used what you suggested and I got results or hey I thought you might want to know that there's an issue with this one piece of your site. That frequency helps build relationships and it takes some time to get this good. How long ago was it that you were at that first conference? In fact, sorry, before you answer, let's bring your website up. Since we're coming to the end, I want to make sure that people see your site. 

Ruben:	Sure.

Andrew:	So how long ago was it since that first conference that you went to?

Ruben:	Maybe seven years ago. I was working at a day job. So, that was a while ago. But even after that first starter conference was also a little awkward for me. I soon learned to start doing things online before I actually, it just helps, as an introvert, to feel like I know at least a couple of people. It's so hard to just go to somewhere and not really know anybody and try to meet people in person. It's difficult. 

Andrew:	Well, I'm glad you did it. I appreciate all the help you've given me, and I appreciate the fact that you did both the interview now on Mixergy and you did this course here with us. When, I think, I asked you to do an interview because my audience asked, and I forwarded you an email from someone in the audience who said, you've got to get Reuben, and I said, Reuben, you should do an interview and you said, Andrew, I'm an introvert. I don't do that stuff. And I said, I've got to keep up with him and I also asked my booker, I said, we've got to get Ruben on. And we did it. It wasn't like it usually is where we say, do you want to be on, and people jump on it, and say, absolutely, can I come on five times a week? How often can I come back? 

With you it was a little bit of work because of this introvert part and I'm really glad you were comfortable sharing that publicly, and then talking about how you get past it and build relationships that build the business. See, my video froze there for a moment, but hopefully it'll come back when I say, thank you for doing the session. Thank you all for watching. Check out BidSketch, and can we include a link to your email?   

Ruben:	A link to my email?

Andrew:	Yeah. Can we let people contact you directly?

Ruben:	Oh yeah. Of course. 

Andrew:	Great. 

Ruben:	So it'll be Ruben@bidsketch.com.

Andrew:	Thank you. Thank you.