This prompted Clay to polish and elaborate on the system at hand and make it what it is today - something to share with the rest of us. Over the next couple of weeks, six of the twelve people emailed Clay to tell him how much of an impact his introduction framework had - and how it changed everything. He experimented with various frameworks to improve his approach on a personal level, but began sharing what he developed with others during a presentation to a group of startups at the behest of entrepreneur Andy Ellwood. And I felt sort of like Chris Farley in those old SNL skits where he slaps his forehead.”Ĭlay walked away from that interaction determined never to make such a poor introduction again. I sort of didn’t recognize him because his social profiles aren’t primarily his face and he kind of had longer, wet hair that day, so it didn’t jump out exactly who he was. It was Matt Mullenweg, the founder of Automattic and creator of WordPress, the software that powers about 30 percent of the Internet! Here I am, chatting up one of my Internet heroes. “And in that moment, I sort of realized who I was talking to. What is it? Maybe I’ve heard of it.’ He said, ‘It’s called Automattic.’ What do you do?’ He said, ‘I run a little software company.’ I said, ‘Well, I’m into startups. So then I said, ‘So what’s your name? What do you do?’ He said, ‘Well, my name is Matt.’ I said, ‘Oh, that’s cool, Matt. I realized, as I was doing it, that it wasn’t very confident. I think I covered where I grew up and my favorite flavor of ice cream and I just went on and on and on. ![]() “I sort of rambled on and on, and I realized…I almost saw myself as I was doing it. ![]() said, ‘Hey! What’s your name and what do you do?’ I introduced myself the way most of us introduce ourselves all the time - which is not in a prepared way. And on one of the breaks, said, ‘Hey, why don’t you turn around and introduce yourself to the person behind you?’ So I did. It was a really interesting conference I was just attending - I wasn’t speaking - but there were other interesting attendees. I was in San Diego at a conference put on by Jim Kwik called SuperheroYou. ![]() As discussed in our recent toolbox episode about perfecting your elevator pitch - that is, a brief and memorable introduction you could make to a fellow passenger in the time it takes to get from the lobby to the penthouse suite - preparation and practice are your biggest allies on this front.Ĭlay tells us about a memorably embarrassing self-introduction he unknowingly made to someone who turned out to be a personal hero - all because he didn’t have an elevator pitch or any introduction strategy of any kind on hand. When you’re always networking (and you should always be networking - whether or not you choose to call it by that particular word), introductions are a pretty big deal. He joins the show to tell us how he overcame this social deficit after making a particularly embarrassing first impression enjoy the show and learn from Clay’s mistakes! When asked what we do by these new acquaintances, most of us have terrible, rambling, non-confident answers - and Clay Hebert of Crowdfunding Hacks confesses he once did, as well. 80,000 opportunities to make a good first impression…but we rarely do. One study says we meet three new people a day on average - that’s over a thousand in a year and more than 80,000 in a reasonably spanned lifetime.
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