Hi Guys,
This a my followup to the post My Bloody Shyness
I got immense help from my fellow RodinHooders whose advises and suggestions I adhered to and was able to overcome my shyness to approach strangers who are my prospective customers .
I am going to list my learnings and how I implemented them, for everyone who is facing this problem of shyness while approaching the customers.
1. First of all, I started by giving demos to myself and after practicing I started giving demos to my frnds and after a few days and n number of demos, I had improved considerably 🙂
Learnings: Practice ,Practice and practice nothing can get you better ,you can get all the advises but people will not do it for you ,you will have to do it yourself .There is a very famous hindi quote :
करत करत अभ्यास के, जड़मति होत सुजान
रसरी आवत जात ते, सिल पर परत निसान
Meaning: Persistence makes even a dumb man intelligent, just like (even) a soft rope, when rubbed continuously on stone, makes a mark on it.
2. I followed Abey Sir’s advice and prepared a survey on google docs and send it to everyone I know and then asked them to send it to everyone they know ,so here I get a huge customer data from those customers whom I cannot reach physically.
Learnings: If you want to reach customers whom you cannot interview personally ,best way is to prepare a survey and fire it upto them, you will get a huge amount of data without even spending a single penny 🙂
3. When I went to face my prospective customers for doing market research ,I was way more confident than the 1st time I had gone to them ,Initially I felt that something was holding me back but then I thought of Alok sir’s words of wisdom “DO JUSTICE TO YOUR PURPOSE AND CAUSE – the courage will come. DONT do justice to your ego or mind” and then I thought what the heck lets just get over this my purpose is bigger than my shyness and then I just went ahead to talk to them and then the experience was so AWESOME,I just then found out that it was so much fun, it was so much enriching to talk to them.I felt like talking to them forever ,they gave us so much feedback that we are able to solve the problems in the idea even before getting into the market.
Learnings: Well what I had learned from this experience is that Dont tell people that you are a startup doing this n that just tell them your idea and make them the part of your startup idea ,people love to be a part of a idea and then the feedback you will get will be awesome.
I would like to thank all my fellow Rodinhooders,without their help this would have not been possible.