I was working with another startup as an intern to study their market strategies and work on new customer aquisition by studying various customer segments. And one day we were called for a meeting. In the meetup with Nupur madam handed us this piece of paper which said ” Idea to Reality-Money Multiplier”.
It was a task for us. The basic idea was to use any sort of idea, and gain money with a maximum seed investment of rs.1500 within next 24hrs. So me and my team mates discussed our ideas overnight and we came up with 24 different ideas and after filtering out we finalized one idea which was to provide website service to all the local stores. Our idea was to sell our talent to the local stores and give them a rich personal feel by providing them websites created in free domain along with a personal article from the owner himself/herself so that their customers would feel connected to the owner while they were looking for a particular store category in the local area, which was technically our USP.
So next day in the morning we set out to sell our product to the nearby stores. The initial store owners welcomed us very well, they asked us about what we were doing and why we were doing it. But as the conversations moved forward, we began to realise that the service we were trying to sell them was not actually needed by them. Then after asking about 30 odd stores we realized that none was interested in buying our service even for free. Then we decided to change the approach. So we went to local wholesale markets to try and understand their needs and see if we could provide them our service, but the result there was same as before. We needed to change our service model else no one was going to buy. So we gave our best to itterate and sell our product and said “Even if are not able to sell our product in one day and earn money we will still take some learnings with us by understanding the needs of those local stores and wholsalers”. And with this approach we kept on going till the evening.
The next day we had reflections with Deepak sir. When we did the analysis of all the things that we did during the past 24hrs, we realized what things went wrong, how we failed to emphasize our customers, how easily we could have done the other things from the list instead of sticking to the same idea. We understood the importance of priority while executing our task in hand without deviating from the main goal. It might have been a failure for us in terms of task, but it was the best learning for us as a team.
Mr. Akshay Gaud
LSE 2018
