I spent the last month doing 20 discovery calls with founders
Wasn't planning to write this up, but the patterns were too consistent to ignore.
What founders actually ask for
When I asked "what do you want from your network?", I expected vague answers. I got razor-specific ones:
- "I need a CMO who's done a B2B SaaS exit between $20M and $50M ARR."
- "I need an intro to the head of partnerships at three specific companies."
- "I need a developer who's shipped a Stripe Connect integration before."
Twenty founders. All of them specific.
What founders offer in return
Then I asked "what do you offer to others?". Total flip:
- "I help companies grow."
- "I'm experienced in operations."
- "I have a strong network."
Vague. Every single one.
The mismatch
The asks are surgical. The offers are wallpaper. That's exactly why people who could help each other never connect — one side is broadcasting, the other is searching, and they're using different vocabularies.
What I'm doing about it
In the calls, the founders who described their offer concretely (1 in 20) closed exchanges with the others within the same conversation. The other 19 left the call with intent and no next step.
So I started forcing myself to write my own offer the same way I write my asks. "I help founders" became "I'm building a B2B platform and I have 4 hours a week to give thorough product feedback to other early-stage SaaS founders."
Within 10 days, three founders took me up on it. Two of them are now beta testers for what I'm building.
TL;DR
If your "ask" is more specific than your "offer", you're broadcasting into the void. Make your offer as concrete as your ask. The match rate goes up overnight.
Curious if anyone else has tested this. What's your offer when someone asks "what can you bring to a conversation?"
It is such a common trap to treat networking like a general broadcast when it really functions more like a high-precision marketplace. Most founders don't realize that by being vague about their "offers," they are essentially forcing the other person to do the mental heavy lifting of figuring out how to use them, which is why those connections almost always stall out.
Since you've seen such a massive jump in engagement by narrowing your own offer, are you planning to build "specificity prompts" or templates into etswap to force users to define their skills as concretely as their needs?
Agreed. Most people are precise about what they want, but vague about what they can actually contribute. A much better offer is something another person can immediately use, like: “I can help a founder understand how a serious buyer is likely to evaluate their business.” That gives the conversation somewhere to go.