I moved to a new city in Jan where I know one person, am starting a new company, and have a young family (e.g. limited time). In the last month I've:

1. Spoken to a group of CEOs about how to solve their product management issues

2. Organized a group of 6 product managers for drinks (I had met two of them once)

3. Demonstrated credibility and a willingness to help enough that I've gotten a bunch of inbound intros to help people with their Product problems

Here's what I did:

1. Connected with people at the local startup hub. There's only one here as it's a small city (< 500k people). I've been working in tech since 2001 and have cultivated a fairly broad network. I was thus able to get an intro to the CEO of the hub here which helped immensely.

2. Share my knowledge. I've been doing Product Management for 16+ years. That's a skill that's needed here. So doing talks through the hub has enabled me to meet people and establish credibility. I put the word out that I'll meet with anybody in the local community to see if I can help with their product issues, and now people are sending me intros to others.

3. Organize people. It takes so little to organize a small group of like-minded folks. Last night I got 6 other Product Managers together here at a bar to talk shop. It was a matter of putting the word out amongst people I'd met via steps 1 and 2 with a time, date, and location.

If you lather, rinse, and repeat steps 2 and 3 you'll establish a good community because you're helping others level up.

Think about this time as an investment in your long term success. Work doesn't always look like writing code or talking to customers - having a peer group and mentors you can learn from will help with strategy, tactics, accountability, and - most importantly - your mental health.

This is very solid, actionable advice that I can follow. Great point about "work doesn't always look like work." Thank you!

These aren't really true in my experience.

I never had someone I'd consider a 'mentor'. And I've had friends but I don't spend a lot of time with them and they don't relate to my business at all.

At the same time, I managed to build a business earning mid-6-digits per month. Not spending time futzing about with other people allowed me to focus on the actual craft and make the product really good. Not having "friends" to distort my thinking and pull every discussion towards common thought patterns and easy-to-understand platitudes allowed me to take my business in new directions that I understood but that others were unable to see or accept.

If you really want to do something different, and seriously intense, very very few people will understand or have what it takes to participate. Put simply, 1-in-1000 people only appear once per thousand people. If you're trying to do a 1-in-1000 challenge, it's almost guaranteed that everyone around you is not up to it. (Of course it's highly likely you aren't up to it either, but you can't walk away from yourself. On the chance that you are up to it, you don't want to screw that up by averaging your results out with people who are far less capable and driven than you).

Extroverts need people to talk to, they have no choice in the matter and some people might need help with knowing where to start with basic stuff like registering a company etc. And some people need some emotional support, it does not need to be logical support just: "you worked hard have a hug" type support.

But I totally agree with the don't talk with people about difficult work stuff you are trying to do to, like it takes years and rare talent to understand something in such a way that you can do "something different, and seriously intense" and make money off it, so there might be nobody in the world that you can have a proper discussion with about your thing.

But on a personal level time spent making friends can be truly rewarding. I mean we humans are herd animals, there is no escaping it. I personally get along truly well with very few people, but I can get along with some people for a short amount of time, so visiting different groups of people from time to time gives me a lot of joy, even if I would never truly get along with those people for more than a few hours each week/month.

I agree that human connections are important and valuable. I just find that they can't have anything to do with work, and they certainly don't help you with your work (which is what the post above said).

The people I interact with socially/romantically can't understand my work at all and are totally separate from it.

Facebook/Twitter.

Its definitely hard to make friends as an adult, so why not reach back into the past and pull an old friend out of the hat?

I moved to NYC at 27 with no friends, no family, only a job offer. It took me 6 months to get settled and in an apartment that I felt comfortable with my wife moving up to. But in that 6 months, I had co-workers that turned into friends, strangers from the neighborhood that turned into friends, and old friends that I reconnected with now that I was 2000 miles away from running into them randomly at a party, funeral, or starbucks.

So if you have a job, start hanging out with those people after work. You can easily find friends and mentors in that group.

A co-working space helps in my experience. Although it's still really hard (at least for me, as an introvert) to build such network. It's scary, but it's the only way.

> This is 100% true, so I have a question. How do you find those when you're already spending all of your time on your startup and new to town without a support network in place?

One option is to join a network like: https://nugget.one

(Disclosure: I'm founder of Nugget)

Some of the best advice I’ve ever received was to only enact one big change at a time.

Moving to a new city and leaving your support networks behind is a big change.

Quitting your job and starting a company is a big change.

Doing them together is perhaps not the wisest course of action.

Meetups are a good place to start imo. Signal vs. noise is sometimes bad, but good groups of people who are building cool things exist almost everywhere.