Lately I've been going to tech meetups and been asking leading questions such as:
"What takes up the majority of your time each day?"
My intention is to try and elicit the person I'm talking too to bitch and complain about some service or protocol or whatever that they use in their stack. Then assuming I find a recurring pattern I can go back to this same set of people and start to trial out a solution.
I'd like to speed this up, however, as I can only have so many meaningful conversations at these events at one time.
preface: I live in SF so it's ridiculously easy for me to potentially meet a ton of cto/vp-eng/developers/etc. but I'm finding trouble trying to use the same tactics through online channels such as email/linkedin/github/etc.
I've gotten a lot of responses in the past by having a direct point of conversation ("what do you think of technology X?") but I'm trying to leave it open ended this time around to collect pain points solely from the person I'm talking with - not ones I'm thinking of.
So to point - any good methods of doing this online?