We know that one of the biggest challenges in a startup is to find the right people – the right team members, the right employees, those customers who are going to be early adopters. We have to look for the right partnerships / vendor relationships.
We create compelling new content and implement new ideas. We also seek endorsement, adoption and promotion from the biggest in names in business for our work. We need to spread the word, we need to collaborate with others, we need to make sure that our ideas and products are adopted by people. To make that possible, we keep working – interacting with our target market, pitching to influencers and potential buyers, talking to our users to improve whatever that is we are doing.
Over time, I have begun to realize that one’s pitch may be terrific but getting results from it involves being able to move people to act. This does not depend only on the pitch, but other factors as well.
What are these factors?
Identifying the right kind of people who are willing to be inspired is probably the most important factor of all.
We as entrepreneurs will be dreamers in our own right, but when we pitch (for anything) we will observe better results when we pitch to someone who has the ability to believe in dreams in general. Not everyone is ready to make an investment today for a better future which may come only a few years later. Not everyone has the imagination or vision to understand our goals. Our ideal targets are also dreamers and visionaries to an extent.
The people who are going to help you the most are the ones who can connect with your dreams. They need to feel that by collaborating or working together with you they would be able to fulfil at least some part of their own dreams (which could even have been long buried and forgotten otherwise).
Here comes the most surprising bit. You may think that such people don’t exist or that they are rare. They may be rare, but they are not really difficult to find – because these people are looking for us just as much as we are looking for them. In a way, they need us to give true meaning to their own lives. If not actively searching, they are waiting to be found, waiting to be shown the path and willing to believe in dreams. If given a chance, their very nature dictates that they will outdo their own abilities in realising these dreams.
From Steve Jobs to George Lucas, the most transformation leaders and dreamers have asserted and demonstrated this too. They start with nothing but a vision, sometimes over-commit and then they get around to fixing each block, fixing each piece in the puzzle, finding the right people one by one – just like we are trying to fix tasks, processes and people, bit by bit.
Look out for them!
We just have to find and identify the right people. We need to develop skills to identify and motivate them.
Written by Abhyudaya Agarwal with some inputs from me.