Sharing a story of my own, at the end of 2014, I read a book on typography and thought that it would be great to have a design studio that could make a real product out of my abilities in design, with a cool portfolio and such. Then I slowly began to think, as a web developer with four years of experience and a second year of graduate school, could I also set up a design-oriented web studio? It's just hard to think about, where to find a list? Where to find partners? Where to get portfolios to convince people of our abilities in the beginning? I don't think there are any friends around who have a deeper understanding of front-end or design, so how can we form a team? At that time, I was quite confused. Then, by chance, when I was chatting with a few friends, I mentioned this idea, and I didn't expect to hit it off right away, and they were also very interested in this kind of studio, so that's how I found my buddies (Bamboo Tip Creative Studio). I hadn't thought of them as potential partners because I was limited by the idea of "finding someone who is good at front-end or design", so I didn't see that being good at back-end or creative would be a good addition to my tech stack.
We were worried about not getting any work, but on second thought, we're still in grad school, so we can just test the waters for a year, and there's not much of an opportunity cost if we don't get any work. But really when we officially announced on New Year's Day this year after the bamboo tip of the creative studio, so far less than a month, there have been more than a dozen projects to find us to discuss, after screening and two of them have signed the contract. Can have so many people in such a short period of time to know us, this is something we did not expect. However, it is reasonable to think that there are so many students around who want to start their own business, and each of them always has a few friends who want to start their own business, even if they are only counting the second degree of friends, such a number is also quite considerable. I've never intentionally tried to run a network, rather than worrying about who will bring you any potential benefits, I'd rather make myself good enough, and rely on fate to attract the others.