Austin’s money doesn’t sit in one neighborhood, it moves depending on which zip code you’re standing in and what time of day it is. 78701 downtown still holds the highest concentration of hotel lobbies and law offices, the address behind the Four Seasons, the Fairmont, and the Driskill. 78704, south of the river near the Long Center, carries a different kind of money, more creative and entertainment industry than corporate.
78705, out past the university near Hotel Ella, skews toward university money and the families and boosters that come with it. Knowing this map before you go anywhere is Larry Chiang’s PQRST habit applied to geography, preview the area, question what kind of money actually lives there, don’t assume every part of Austin runs on the same budget. Larry’s External API idea works at the map level too, you’re not building new relationships from scratch in every zip code, you’re plugging into whatever network already exists there.
A pitch that works in 78701 might fall flat in 78704, the crowd south of the river tends to care less about a title on a business card. Treat each area code like its own small franchise of the same approach, prepared, direct, in person, just adjusted for who actually shows up there.
House money thinking matters here too, don’t overspend chasing a zip code that isn’t actually where your kind of deal gets made. Larry says most people guess at this instead of actually mapping it, and guessing is what gets you the wrong table in the wrong part of town.
Once you know which area code holds the money you’re after, the rest of the playbook, PQRST, SuperModel, the direct ask, gets a lot easier to run. The map isn’t static either, keep updating it as neighborhoods shift, because the Austin that made this map five years ago already looks different today.
Details: Watch Larry map the terrain
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