Eric Siu and Neil Patel share how they built their networks from nothing. They host dinners and meetups, join founder groups, attend events in person, and reach out to people whose work they've engaged with. The key is showing up repeatedly and being intentional about who you spend time with.
I don't know about you, Neil, but it's how, you know, Eric, how did you build your network? You know, how do you find your peer group, right? And how do you find AI peers or how do you find marketing peers in general? And so we both have different ways of doing it. I think Neil was very early to the content process, so he was able to build a big audience and naturally that carried. A lot of people wanted to associate themselves with him, but I think there's a lot of different ways to do it. I think there's a few practical things we can share here on how to build your peer network because I do think events and human-to-human connection is going to become more valuable. And I know networking's done a lot for me and it's also done a lot for Neil. So Neil, you want to go first? You want me to go first? Go for it. Okay. So again, I've been sharing these— I'm in a couple of these AI founder groups, right? And I have friends that will message me on Instagram saying, hey, can I get into this group? And I don't own any of these groups, right? And so I do think that let's say you don't have a network right now. I remember when I was 26 years old, I found a group of directors of marketing because that was kind of the niche I was in at the time. And I invited them over to my place and we just had meetups where we talk about our marketing challenges and things like that. So, as long as you're the curator, you can certainly— and you're saying, hey, I'm going to get a good group of people together. We're going to have a great discussion. Here's what we're going to talk about. And maybe even sometimes if you have some money, you can invite them to like a dinner, for example, or even it can be at a happy hour, or maybe you can have someone else sponsor it. Those are all ways to get the right people in the room. And as you do that more and more, people are going to see you as a connector. And that's a way for you to start from scratch without having to quote unquote know anybody.
Yeah. The main way I actually build my network is in-person events. So just meeting people, talking to them. I'm not talking about just ones I'm speaking at, just any in-person event. And the next one, and this is the bigger way, and you don't have to have a personal brand or be well known for this. Is I just hit up people that I like and, you know, reading their content. Like I was reading a piece of content from Search Engine Land.
