Get Ready to Pay Your Network
Networks over outbound when AI comes for sales
As AI eventually kills outbound as a channel, networks will become all-important.
The scale of outbound sales will increase by orders of magnitude and the well will become permanently poisoned. Your bot’s emails and calls will just go unanswered. Your AI generated SEO blog posts will go unread. Your personalized video won’t feel special.
There will be infinite, undifferentiated competition for every opportunity and so those direct with access to wide or specialized networks of buyers, talent, knowledge, etc. will become valuable gatekeepers. Distribution will be everything.
Imagine a version of prompting “I am Y looking to meet X for Z purpose and I’m willing to pay $N for intros” that routes you to the right nodes who in turn route you to the right end person or business.
That’s a total refactor of the way sales, recruiting, networking, research, and discovery work today. The most logical places to start this from zero would be sales, recruiting, and expert networks because of the propensity to pay and short time to value.1 But there’s no reason this doesn’t both generalize across user types and verticalize around more niche use cases.
In an age of inbound, referrals and network will be everything. So get ready to pay your network.
Some reader feedback on my original post
It feels too transactional (the hiring markets especially)
Totally right. Which is part of why I think this starts in already transactional corners of business. Namely sales. Getting beyond that and into more relationship driven categories will take more of a cultural shift. I’m not sure that hiring will be first or even second on the list.
I don’t want everything to become those pay-to-play expert networks
This will come down to product and community management IMO. If it replicates spam the business might “work” but it won’t be important and people will hate it. And unlike expert network calls, the ROI is much more measurable so any success will be short-lived (the channel either performs and thrives or doesn’t and dies).
This is moving back to basics of old school industries.
Totally. Nothing is new. All we can do is systematize and scale concepts that have been around for a long time.
The takeaway from these responses (and from me) is that the failure mode here will be reproducing spam/creating another channel for spam. The people with the most social capital (those whose referrals mean the most) will be most unwilling to expend/risk it. The people with the least social capital will try to make it up in volume. So the job of any network orchestration platform will be in trust and safety to keep throughput low (and conversion high) just as much as it is in growth.
I Wrote
Let me run physician side gigs. This is basically my favorite internet business but it could be so much more.
Get ready to pay your network. There will be infinite, undifferentiated competition for every opportunity and so those direct with access to wide or specialized networks of buyers, talent, knowledge, etc. will become valuable gatekeepers.
If the Ghiblis have taught us anything it’s that deep down inside where we live we’re all just Facebook minion moms.
Abundance
I am ashamed to admit that I haven’t finished my review of Abundance. This is Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s new book on remaking America as a society of plenty where government is empowered to actually improve lives rather than being an instrument for cruelty or an impediment to progress. Achieving that will require a fundamental refactoring of our political culture and bureaucratic state. But I think this will be the winning message for liberals over the next decade as we stare down the barrel of intertwined crises in governance, climate, inequality, etc. The fight is winnable.
It’s been really encouraging to see the response so far. These ideas can gain traction and be a positive vision for the future (more good things) in contrast to either de-growth or MAGA Maoism.
I Read
Venture Manager Selection: Capitalising on Arbitrage Windows - Jordan Nel
The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans
You’ve certainly all already read this Atlantic story so here is my favorite meme about it:
There is also probably a good crypto/native token story here to incentivize early and ongoing network participation.