This story, related by an entrepreneur friend of mine, is a great example of how to fill a gaping need in your business creatively and inexpensively.
I was about six months into my start-up when I realized that a huge part of what was holding the team back was that we lacked a hustler. Someone who, for better or for worse, was shameless about promoting what we were doing and getting people to use our beta. Our team had a ton of skills, but, while we all believed in the vision, we felt sheepish about really twisting people’s arms to get them to try what we were doing. Worse than that, though, we were often apologetic about the state of our product, even its core benefits.
I remember having an hour long meeting with a VC whom I was speaking with. As I’d go through the idea, his eyes would light up, but then, instinctively, I would highlight the risks and uncertainties about really driving adoption. I’m not sure why – I think I was just worried that if this whole thing fell through, I didn’t want to be perceived as a liar or a fraud. But it’s not lying or fraudulent to promote a vision. It’s what we have to do to gain traction and give our start-ups a chance.
So I asked myself, “Who is our team missing and how can we fill that role?” Well, I knew the type of person we needed. We needed a backslapping, joke-telling, story-spinning loudmouth who would give someone a tour of a half-built house and convince them that they had to move in right away. We needed someone who had no qualms about asking early users to keep coming back because they couldn’t bear to miss the next iteration. Filling the role, though, was much more of a challenge. We couldn’t afford to spend money on a sales role when we needed every dollar for development. Figuring out how to bring someone on for equity and commission, when we had no clear sales goals and a nebulous set of responsibilities wouldn’t work either. Besides, dealing with the legal hassle of equity sharing this early in the venture would have been an unnecessary distraction. Asking some friends to moonlight as our mouthpiece was a pipe dream. It was time to be creative.
I looked online and saw that a local theater group was running a six-week actor’s workshop. For $50 a session, an hour a week, I started to develop and create this sales role I needed. I read Stanislavski’s book on Method Acting, and practiced in the mirror. I learned about how actors subvert their own personalities to inhabit the role. In the end, I filled our role with…myself.
I remember running into that same VC at a networking session. I walked right up to him, put my hand on his shoulder, shook his hand, cracked a joke and then asked him if he’d tried our product. He said he was getting around to it. I said, “Jim, enough horseshit. Take out your phone. Let’s do it right here.” He was stunned, but pulled out his phone. I downloaded the app, chatting him up the whole time, and got him to play around with it. Each objection I spun into a positive and I left with a time to follow-up.
When I got into his office a week or so later, I was back to being me. We chatted and then he said, “What was that last week?” I said, “Jim, I needed a guy. I needed a promoter. We’re on a tight budget, so I got creative and found someone who loved our product enough to join the team for nothing. And he wants to know if you want to play 18 holes next week.”
As my partners and I develop PhilterIt, we love to hear stories like this. What creative ways can we apply to fill the endless needs we have given the constraints of time and resources? In what ways can we push ourselves beyond our comfort zones to position our product for success? If anyone else has any interesting examples of how to creatively fill a need, I’d love to hear them.
