Passing on a China Christmas

(note the site is moving to http://prodigalmba.rstoem.com . . . !)

Well I've participated in a few competitive grant program recently - and actually won one of them. The first was GreenStsrt. It's an incubator right in the middle of San Francisco. Unfortunately I didn't make that one. At that point the pivoting was undeveloped enough that I had to half-a$$ the application, and I'm sure they knew it.

However, separately I also got introduced to the fine folks at HYSTA (Hua Yuan Science and Technology Association). It's a Silicon Valley organization of Chinese American entrepreneurs and investors that counts AliBaba's Jack Ma and Yahoo's Jerry Yang among its participants.

A lot of the folks at HYSTA work as unpaid volunteers - so good for them, their work is appreciated. The program is to send entrepreneurs to mainland China to network with investors and go to all the tech parks. In fact I've visited a lot of these tech parks before, but only one in any kind of official capacity. Basically the park administrators try to convince you to rent space in the parks, which is fine.

I had more time and help to prepare than with Greenstart, so two weeks ago I found myself pitching Really Solid Technology over on University Avenue in Palo Alto to a few VC's acting as gatekeepers. That was really fun because all of the kibbitzing was in Chinese. There were about twenty other entrepreneurs pitching that same evening. Turns out they thought my pitch was one of the best there! I was really stoked about that, especially since I hadn't converted my slide deck into Mandarin. Just goes to show that substance still matters, not just the sheen.

Anyways, HYSTA organized grant-seeking from the city of Guangzhou to its participant who had pitched well - where the grant wasn't guaranteed. A close friend helped me translate my bio into Chinese, submitted it, and lo and behold last night I found out I was awarded a $1200 reimbursement for flying to Guangzhou and visiting the convention there.

So I felt fantastic, but I already knew I probably couldn't go: you see HYSTA would pick up most of the rest of the expenses (food, lodging, domestic travel) throughout the Chinese cities, provided I was able to commit soon enough. And a commitment equaled paying a previously unannounced $100 fee for their volunteer efforts. It took too long (precisely one day too long) for Guangzhou to come through with their reimbursement response. Since I had to count on the Guangzhou subsidy before I could even *consider* going, HYSTA had to pass my opportunity on to the next person. Whatev, they're still nice people and they had already extended the deadline for the better part of a week on my behalf; and i appreciate that.

I felt ok overall. After all I enjoy the chance to connect with investors as much as the next overly-optimistic entrepreneur, but I've got bigger fish to fry in the form of executing on a bootstrapping plan. (NB Bootstrapping = don't need investors).

So good luck to the Chinese-American entrepreneur who got my spot - ya better make the most of it!

(and don't forget, I continue transitioning to the blog to http://prodigalmba.rstoem.com , so have a look, bookmark it or rss it (click the big orange button on the right of the opening page), and let me know what you think!

Harvard curriculum change : HBS now equals "start a business in a developing country"

I'm a *big* fan of a stalwart like Harvard doing this with their business school curriculum http://www.economist.com/node/21541045

Why? Cuz I, well, did it - and still rockin' and rollin'. Just have to read this blog to see how it all has been playing out. Stay tuned for more, and bookmark The Walkabout Blog's new site at http://prodigalmba.rstoem.com !

Twitter - the "Bank Assassin"

November 5th is something called "Bank Transfer Day". It's getting especially propagated on the likes of Twitter with hashtags such as #banktransferday.
        If I were either among BofA, Citibank, or Chase, (we can simply call them by their industry association name, the American Banker's Association or ABA) I would be shit-scared right now. Not necessarily over the Bank Transfer Day itself, but what it represents: decentralized-yet-coordinated mass bank runs. Today we have an added twist, and to understand it I need to explain to you the meaning of something called "reserve requirements".
        Banks earn most of their money from interest paid out by us consumers and business operators on loans we take out, whether for homes, student loans, or for our businesses. There is a limit imposed by federal law to how much money a bank can loan out. If a bank is fortunate enough to maintain, say, a hundred million dollars in the form of 'demand deposits' which is to say, cold hard cash readily available for consumers to take from the ATM at their leisure, then that bank is equipped to issue one billion dollars in interest-earning loans. In issuing those loans, the bank is maintaining something called a 10% "reserve requirement". This means that the demand deposits are 10% of the loan book's size.
        Now the reserve requirement is something that the Federal Reserve under Ben Bernanke has control over. As opposed to the example above, it's not fixed at ten percent exactly, but varies, generally between ten and twenty percent. It's one of a few levers of monetary policy the Fed has to influence the nation's economic activity. (Yes, the Fed wishes those levers were more effective than a rusted car's unhinged steering wheel, but that's another story for another time).
        If a bank's reserve amount compared to it's outstanding loans falls below the federally mandated reserve requirement too far for too long, then we're far beyond the mild inconvenience of reduced earnings. Instead, now the FDIC is required by law to send their agents in, discharge the bank's managers, and put the bank into receivership. Particularly their goal is to find a new buyer for the bank. Remember Washington Mutual bank? This happened to them in September 2008, and they were bought by Chase. FDIC did it's job well.
        Now for the twist: Like most businesses, banks rely on a certain degree of historical statistics to stay afloat. They know from long experience that on average, the masses don't simultaneously come knocking on their door demanding to withdraw their funds. The exception to this rule is something called a Black Swan event. A Black Swan event is glibly summarized by any unlikely scenario that suddenly becomes unexpectedly inevitable. Where this happened in the form of the Depression and its associated bank runs, the big banks now feel (at least they certainly hope) that the government's Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation formed post-Depression to guarantee people's deposits up to a couple hundred thousand dollars, reduces peoples' tendencies to get panicky and initiate a bank run.
        Twitter changes all that. Twitter followers via hashtags such as #banktransferday (just search for that keyword, pound and all, on www.twitter.com) can initiate a Black Swan event at the stroke of a key. Historical statistics be damned: How will banks expect themselves to carry on normal business under the current regulatory regime when they can be shot out of the water after a few short weeks of spontaneously-initiated Twitter-based word-of-mouth-building?
        So what does the future predict? Well, the #OccupyWallStreet-ers will withdraw their funds from the bank, but the effect will be modest enough that banks will have time to react - including reducing teller availability to stem the rate at which people can close their accounts, as well as initiating periodic traffic 'outages' on their online banking for outgoing transfers. These inconveniences would have the effect of discouraging the non-die-hard Twitter-organized bank runners. However the #Occupiers will have successfully forced the banks to originate fewer new loans, and thus their new revenue generating capability will have been effectively stifled.
        On November 5th The ABA will learn this sting of a lesson in social networking, and will know that their member banks came dangerously close to getting raided by the FDIC, getting put into receivership. So I highlighted what ABA would probably initiate among its member banks in the short run, but what will they do in the long run? Well over the next months, expect the ABA to lobby hard on Ben Bernanke's Fed as well as Congress to loosen reserve requirements or otherwise allow them to temporarily swing below the minimum requirement level for longer durations. This can give ABA member banks time to get new infusions of cash from the Fed (or from Warren Buffett ).
        And they'll be doing all this quietly because they don't want to provoke another, larger Twitter-juiced bank run . Who's got the upper hand in this struggle? The #Occupiers by far. It may be the only ace they have to keep bank fees and interests rates reflecting the true costs of administering loans and money circulation instead of the ABA member banks' shareholders' inflated sense of expected returns. But boy is it a damn powerful one.

Orissa Market Trials Pt II

Recap: This is the second of two parts on market trialing of a hand dynamo phone charger called the K-Turn Monster. I'm conducting the trials in a rural part of India's Orissa state near a small town called Parlekhemundi.



Orissa is a beautiful state with serene landscapes - the Eastern Ghat mountains are spaced with rice paddies in between them. Take a look:



The previous post finished with the initiation of a one-week user test, including a town and a village. Electrician vocational students (pictured) from a school I'm staying at introduced us to their home villages. These photos should indicate what some of these villages look like:




During the week while users were trying the product, I completed a tie up with an organization I’m close with here called AID-ITC for them to stock the units and fulfill basic servicing as necessary. So in the box of K-Turn Monsters, users are now getting warranty cards in addition to a promo handout for showing their friends. Here is some background on AID-ITC:



Closely associating itself with Gandhian values, Aid Industrial Training Center (ITC) is part school for 5-8 year old children coming from surrounding villages. It is also in skills building, maintaining significant capacity for training in sewing and pottery. New school rooms are completing construction designed by US-trained civil engineer Dr. Dhanada Mishra. There’s a co-op quality to it as there are irrigated rice paddies on the premises.


It’s here I absolutely must give a special shout-out to Dr. Nrusingha Panda who coordinates AID-ITC – Dr. Panda has been instrumental to coordinating my getting set up here especially with staying at the business school CSRM.

With his guidance and Dr. Dhanada Mishra’s help, I benefited from accessing the campuses’ excellent facilities such as its well-stocked technical and business libraries as well as reaching out to both MBA and vocational students, plus the vocational lab.
Big shout-outs also to Deepak Kumar and Manas Samal. These MBA students of CSRM made for excellent assistants and translators and I was very pleased to have them join up for these efforts. They’re also rockin’ volleyball players to boot, an activity that made staying here especially fun!

Now on to the user tests. With the communities we visited, our goal was to treat each community as a social network within which we would seed opinion leaders and high status individuals. That being the ideal, we of course compromised when encountered by reality on the ground. We did the user tests to gain 1) comprehension of how users would use the product 2) Feedback on price points. Knowing that word of mouth would get around, I designed the study so that we would test high price points first, then steadily graduate to lower price points as circumstances warranted. The communities are a small, 30,000 person town called Kasinagar, and a small village, perhaps 200 persons in the immediate area called Anu Konda.

Kasinagar (above) and Anu Konda (below) communities

In the town it was difficult to seed people who could reference each other (see Geoffrey Moore's Crossing the Chasm and Everett Roger's Diffusion of Innovation), we just stuck with individuals that we somehow managed to connect ourselves to. These were a mobile accessory shopkeeper, a factory worker, the son of the town chairman, and the electrical vocational student who led us there. The village was small enough for this kind of social navigation, but I think we got so caught up with the crowd that presented itself that we neglected to assert seeking out the opinion leaders like the village sarpanch or the highly influential school-teachers. Selected testers including students and paddy farmers.


Town and village dwellers learning about dynamo phone charging

During the testing week we called each of our test users. We reached the Kasinagar town users easily and they reported no problems and simply inquired about the price. Unfortunately we couldn't connect to the Anu Konda village users by phone! Their phones always read as off or out of antenna range, perplexing us. Naturally, we were eager to find out what was going on as the inability to reach them might speak to inferior capability of the K-Turn. At the end of the test week, we visited Kasinagar. We provided our post-survey and offered a higher pricepoint. Per the survey the residents appreciated the phone charging and torch functionality. Everyone found our high pricepoint to expensive, so zero sales unfortunately.

The next day we visited Anu Konda village. Despite our expressed wish to survey people alone to avoid influenced responses, the same crowd as before who had become our testers, quickly gathered. Now, what ensued perplexed me greatly - what I could make out to start with was a lot of elevated chatter in Telugu (secondary local language) which unfortunately none of my team could speak. What I could make out was their continuously repeating the English word "Rate!" "Rate!" which is their word for price. We had translated for us then that everyone thought that we would somehow force them to pay for the price of the unit. We learned that was informed by a difficult experience they had in the past where an outsider came to the town to sell medicines on a weekly installment basis. However the mechanics of that transaction worked out, after some weeks outsider ended up walking off with their money without providing enough product.
So, picturing a torch-and-pitchfork situation for getting the evil beast (me!) out of their village, I refunded their 20 rupee deposit on the spot to help reinforce that there was no way we could force them to pay anything for the products, following which they also returned the units. I went a bit further and stated that we would not sell to them at all at this time, a change from plan. Still came the entreaties "Rate, rate!" Informed by the Kasinagar price feedback, elucidated distribution costing, and discussions with my team, we had come to a moderate end user price point - but this was to be disclosed at the end of the survey only when it came time to offer a sale. So instead I had them disclose this moderate price point right away. Now *as soon* as they heard it, they immediately lost interest in any further discussion or interaction, and simply walked away. Ouch!
I'm not gonna lie - that encounter bummed me out. I think I'll never quite understand, after all the good will we built when we first visited their village, why the villager testers up and walked away, denying the benefit of their valuable feedback. For sure they seemed very skeptical that we wouldn't disclose the price ; No matter how irrational it sounds, in my gut I felt that all they wanted was to spoil what must be our 'nefarious' user test plans. We managed to give that village's vocational student a survey, and learned second-hand from his father that the testers, his neighbors, were trying the product over the next day, and after some ad-hoc phone testing, quickly lost interest. I'm told we also suffered some simple bad luck, an influential non-tester with an axe to grind spread around a lot of negativity over it. Ah well, feedback's feedback, even if it doesn't come in the form we intended - 'price is too expensive, and the product requires to much effort to provide value'.
Back at the school the next day, I informed the Kasinagar vocational student of the lowered price, feeling bad about having had to offer him a higher price earlier for test purposes, and knowing he'd find out about it anyways. Instead of being unhappy or angry, he decided to purchase a unit! So I walked him through the warranty card filling and it was done.

(. . . )

With many pieces in place, I still had to finish setting up the channel before leaving. With product stocked at AID-ITC, numbers hashed out, and servicing in place, I still needed to identify a means of driving sales. AID-ITC was too remote from the main road to be an obvious place to draw people. Time was getting on and I wasn't sure what to do. I went to go think about it over some micro-coffees made outside the school gate where there are some shops for food and daily essentials. I'd become friendly with the instant coffee vendor and he knew what business I was doing. We'll call him Coffee-Wallah.
Well some days earlier I had made an random visit to a nearby village named Upalada close to the CSRM / Centurion Institute of Technology. I was told I'd be reaching them during their Haat, or village market session, and I thought I would try to build some demand demo'ing the K-Turn there. I wandered around making my way to the dais where the Haat should be taking place while carrying a box of K-Turns. I was getting a lot of looks and hearing a lot of abruptly ended conversations as I passed. Picture that you’re in your own town when a spaceships lands and a sandal-clad alien gets out to wander up and down your neighborhood streets and you get the idea.
It turned out the Haat had long since finished that day. Sighing I returned to the main road, for hailing passing buses returning to the school. Unfortunately, the streets were empty of any passing traffic. Meanwhile some locals gathered, asking me, "What's in the box?" I ignored, certainly it was too dark to do a demo, and anyways strange aliens initiating impromptu nighttime street introductions are no way to introduce a brand. But they were insistent, thinking to myself 'alright well they asked for it' and I began my demo. A crowd gathered, and I started showing them their phones getting charged with the K-Turn. Got some low-ball purchase offers and a request for shop-stocking. I passed around flyers containing contact infos in case any of them really wanted to try engaging. A truck finally came, and they arrange with the drivers to take me the 10 kilometers back to the school.
Ordinarily I would have filed the Upalada visit under 'random company ego stroking' and continued with channel-bringup activities, which brings us back to the Coffee Wallah. So once again I was pensively kicking back a few with Coffee-Wallah right outside the school's main gate. As I wallowed in caffeine-infusion, someone else kept trying to get my attention making turning motions with his hands. Finally gaining the presence of mind to realize he was mimicking the K-Turn motion, I asked him where he came from. He replied, 'Upalada', 10 kms away! He was part of the crowd I demo'd to! He trades in gas canisters up and down the road. It dawned on me that Coffee-Wallah's stand is a roadside hub stop for trade traffic up and down the road! So that same day I formulated a proposal for C-W - demo the K-Turn to appropriate passers by, especially traders, and explain to them how they can get their hands on it at nearby-yet-remote AID-ITC. He readily agreed to the terms I described - Now he earns 15 rupees commission for every unit traceable to his recommendation via a 'Coffee-Wallah sent me' declaration from the customer.

Coffee Wallah's demo'ing the K-Turn Monster

So now I have stock placed and a means to drive sales which is precisely what I need to have a complete channel with demand I can monitor over time – Excellent!
Summary: So as pleased as I was with the execution and progress, I would call the user feedback overall as negative, which is to say not justifying moving more volumes of the current product in this particular market unless the channel starts showing demand. Learnings are
1) improved market /targeting based on statistical information of cell antenna placement, call volume at a particular antennae, antenna ontime, and electricity ontime. In practice it would be very difficult to get all of these information even for a single mobile operator, but government-owned BSNL offers some promise as they are required to disclose.
2) product repositioning / refocus brand message.
Its clear that villagers will not suffer manual effort any more than the rest of us would to keep their phones charged when they have intermittent electricity available. That leaves commuters and emergency preparers as the remaining market segment. The branding statement then becomes “The K-Turns provide peace of mind - no matter what calamity has befallen you, you always have the power to keep connected on your cell phone”.
And I'm en route to the US. As I write I’m at rest on a meadow in Delhi’s central Connaught Place. Eagle-eyed readers will note that the remaining market segments include many devel*oped* world consumers, so while I'm monitoring demand from this micro-business I've set up and determining next steps, I’m finding that some related projects are germinating in mind . . .

Fasting in the face of corruption

This is an interim post as I'm completing the (large) post for the recent India work.
Indians recently have been supercharged by the protest, arrest, and fasting of a famous activist named Anna Hazare. (Anna's a man's name here). He's an older fellow associating himself with Gandhian tradition. He advocates the passage of a far-reaching anti-corruption bill in Parliament. The photo above shows the gateway of the remote rural school I was staying at in Orissa state's far-afield Parlekhemundi. When Anna was arrested, the students at the school spelled out 'No More Corruption' in candles, pictured above. Later they marched en masse around the town.
I first heard of this man in business school during a class in social entrepreneurship describing how back in the 1980's he got a village in Maharashtra state to close its abused alcohol shops, ultimately leading to much greater prosperity in the village. (I found it interesting, I am still as big a fan as the next guy of spirits ;) ) He's since set his sites on eradicating Indian corruption now, which is sort of like living in California and trying to eradicate the sunshine. So his influence and capturing of the Indian spirit is really impressive. Also, the body he demands to pass his bill is the same containing the members he accuses of corruption - people who would risk being detained and punished for corrupt practices after the bill's passage. Talk about an uphill battle. And so the progress of his movement's success is all the more impressive - Parliament agreed in principle to his demands, and after twelve days his fast was to close just this morning. Can you imagine, in the US, someone fasting to protest campaign finance? Then can you imagine that within two weeks, both houses of Congress debating the issue ad nauseam due to his fast? I think our system would let the man starve without so much as paying lip service to his cause inside the Capitol.

Well as I write I'm in Delhi during a two day layover. I overcame a bout of Delhi-belly (don't eat from the roadside nut vendors!) that unfortunately emptied itself all over the center of Connaught Place, and promptly headed to the city's Ramlila Maidan grounds to see Hazare's protest.

I tried on a hat of the same style that Mr. Hazare wears - see the photo below of an example of one - these hats were very popular at his rally, and a local handed me one :) .  Yet I debated how much direct support I wanted to show - I generally try to steer clear of showing my opinions in the middle of another country's political rally especially when I have limited visibility into the issues. Academics can rightly critique that his rally is motivating the passage of a bill forming a top-level organization above parliament and answerable to no one. I decided that anti-corruption in general was a worthwhile theme to get around, and moreover that marshaling the public energy towards achieving a shared public good is much more needed in the short term than early intellectual dithering resulting in inaction. I see and experience the far reaching effects of corruption every day while in India, including my day's Delhi-belly (think public works, sanitation, promoting food-prep practices). See my later posts from 2008 showing some effects of corruption.


How often does your grandfather (e.g. above) care enough about an issue that he'll *sit* and perhaps even *sleep* in the middle of the protest grounds?

I came across just one other foreigner on the grounds; I guess I was a little disappointed in the backpacker set. A note for travelers staying in Delhi: If you're going to stay in a moderately priced guesthouse, I highly recommend staying in Delhi's suburb called Gurgaon. The chaos level is *much* less than the Delhi itself, tends to be much cleaner, and often still with good access to the metro subway. I'll recommend where I stayed with excellent ambience and super friendly staff, the Royal Park Plaza in DLF Phase-1. You can search it on Google.

User Tests in India

Although this is a personal blog, so much of my time is spent on efforts developing my company that I thought I would post some company updates here. To remind: I push forward my startup in marketing off-grid mobile phone chargers to markets in the developing world. The chargers run on mobile, hand-operated dynamos.

I spent July in Shenzhen, securing exclusivity from my supplier of unique product who I have an excellent relationship with, agreeing on a turnkey model for their order fulfillment to my customers, identifying 2nd and 3rd product offerings, getting the first barebones website up and running at www.rstoem.com (check it out!), and took 30 units of the largest, most heavy-duty product with me to India for trialing with end users and sales. On to India efforts:

I've benefited a lot from introductions to people and organizations in the rural area of Orissa I'm based in, near the small town called Parlakhemundi. I'm happy to be based out of a well equipped, rural school called Jagganath Institute for Technology and Management.

View of campus from the library of JITM.

Importantly, they consist of a business school, technology school, and a vocational school. Two of the MBA students volunteered to help me plan and execute the marketings surveys and user testing. I decided we would present our plan to the vocational students since they come just from the surrounding villages, giving us the introductions we needed into their communities. (Students from the other schools, by contrast, come from all over the entire state of Orissa and then some, making them inappropriate for introductions). That presentation succeeded nicely, and we got four villages meeting the criteria we stated.
Following this, so far individuals from one local village and one small town have been carefully seeded with K-Turn Monsters for 1 week of user testing. Each person gets surveyed about their lifestyle and income, and puts down a twenty Rupee deposit (about 50 cents US) to ensure they ascribe some value to the product during the week of testing. After the week is up they will be surveyed again on if and how they used the product, and finally be given the opportunity to buy it. Excitement during our visits from people who listen to us introduce the product is always high, but I know that this is transient and must be backed up by their experience during the testing period. Right now am deciding which if any other villages will be visited.
Major learnings from this so far are centered around village segmentation. One
village will have lots of electricity on-time while another will not. One village will have high correlation of cell phone signal on-time to electricity on-time while another will not. (That correlation is important, villages with accessible cell phone signal even when there is no electricity, surprisingly common, are more compelling customers) Finally I'm more and more aware of an important BOP-marketing challenge - the greater the need of a village for a given good or service, the less accessible they are likely to be, and the less their ability to pay for products. So efficient targeting is paramount, so villages can be selected efficiently. Also efficient word of mouth building is critical, so that needful villagers can select themselves to seek out the product wherever it is stocked.
On the technical side of things, only last week noted that the units I'm carrying
differ from my sample in important ways. The dynamo diameter was subtly but importantly smaller which reduces its effectiveness on phones. Also, all of the units, including the approved sample, lacked lubrication and had a handle joint that was prone to slipping out. Luckily this school I'm based out of has a vocational branch where I was able to procure grease and adhesive to solve these problems. It just takes some time to make these fixes, about 10 mins per unit, so my little dorm room here looks like a workshop.
As I've been writing this post, have gotten feedback from one of the vocational students that his unit isn't continuously charging the phones he has tried on. If that's correct, it is unfortunate as the units I've provided for user testing that have performed well on my test phones. Phones he has tried on, Nokias, Micromaxes, and China's G5, are particularly prevalent in this environment so his feedback is important. Also as an electrician vocational student his opinion will be particularly referred to in his community. I'm having the student bring his K-Turn tomorrow so I can test it and with any luck, fix it so it works on his phone.
Finally, got feedback from the Jamaica/Haiti mobile operator, unfortunately negative. They
reported that the samples work as advertised, but, quoting: "
- The manual factor was not very appealing
- The life of the charge for the effort was not great
- The price point of the device was high "

So summarizing, progress is strong, but encountering negative market feedback... Anyways I'm particularly enjoying the successful relationship navigating, something this engineer has been historically very bad at . . . this is one point where some INSEAD org-behavior simulations are turning out very helpful. And I'm deeply indebted to Dhanada Mishra, Prof. Haribandhu Panda, Aid India / Aid-ITC organizations, and Orissa's JITM / Centurion Institute of Technology, and of course Patrick Walsh for all of their support through these efforts.

Release your dark side, and then discover immense value in channeling it

I found the attached image supremely inspiring :) - Which is he more likely to become one day, a finance spreadsheet wizard or a CEO? Enjoy :)

A squeak out through the Great Firewall

Wow, the internet blocking here in mainland China has become really difficult - Even mobile email status updates don't work anymore.  Sorry for seeming out of touch everyone, always here, be back in a week and a half.     General update: Shenzhen is changing fast, this fascinating city is whitewashing itself in preparation for summer sports games.  For better or for worse, it's definitely starting to mature from its Wild West days.  

Video marketing

So the quality is obvious very low for this, but it's a first pass that describes one marketing approach - i.e. even low-income consumers in the developing world can access product references from the internet.



And yeah, we'll work on the whole RTS <-> RST thing . . . ;)

Sales in Little India Pt. 2

So last Sunday's purpose was to verify the previous week's sales weren't a fluke. Now, this time the odds were stacked against me for sure: 1) I hadn't managed to get Kumar to commit to assisting with sales in the days prior to last Sunday, and 2) the retailer started talking about charging to rent the space out front, making noises that I was drawing attention away from the other two revenue-generating storefront vendors of phone cards - in short, I had just one hour, from 5pm - 6pm, to do my marketing. So I went in expecting difficulty - can a foreigner sell to skeptical Tamil buyers? Kumar was clearly key to sales last week; I had been out there last week for three hours on my own without securing the attention I needed to even begin explaining how the product works, that is until Kumar came along, having just finished his construction work and joining in with his successful demo'ing and sales efforts.
So I set up shop. After forty five minutes, I had difficulty attracting the attention I needed, just a few demos to a few individuals. The end of my time window was approaching, so I started packing up, unsure of how to interpret things. I happened to be cranking the charger as I stood up to start closing, cause someone noticed and came over. I demo'd and explained to him, and a crowd gathered. By the time I continued demo'ing to others, he decided to buy, and I fulfilled his purchase. So there it was, second week, and demand is demonstrated once again (sigh of relief!). However the crowd had dissipated In the minutes it took for me to fulfill the buyer's purchase; since the demo's drive sales, and I couldn't keep the demo momentum up while fulfilling the buyer's purchase. And yet I was feeling good - in spite of odds stacked against me, I could still sell product, and last week was not a fluke.
Satisfied, I closed up shop then, and continued to plan the way forward: Yes, partners are needed on the marketing and sales side, so I've put out the word on that.

PS Finally, the thing I'm learning about consumer tech product sales is, you don't really ever sell. You explain how the product works, how to use it, and what it can do for them. People make and assert their own buying decision of their own accord. There's no 'selling' moment. They buy or don't buy, and that's it.

Selling in Little India

Last Sunday represented a successful run of sales in Little India. I have to try to repeat the effort this Sunday to verify the non-fluky-ness of last Sunday, so we'll see what happens. In short, this was a watershed moment for my company, as it showed that there is real market demand (translate that to, people are willing to reach their hands into their pocket, taking out cash to give me, in exchange for my product). Rock on.

Little India video

A dose of cultural sampling amid the business activities! I'll provide the track name on request.

Gatekeepers

I operate RST out of a member supported tech office space in Singapore called Hackerspace.  You can look it up on www.hackerspace.sg  This afternoon there was a knock on the door in the Singapore hackerspace. There was a woman, japanese, speaking carefully enunciated but broken english.  I wasn't sure what she wanted, but she appeared to have some sincere
needs.  She mentioned the word 'job', yet she had a minimum of the things you would imagine someone
looking for a job would carry, like a CV.  Yet as an entrepreneur, I'm conditioned to despise gatekeepers,
especially the box-checking kind, so despite my cautious door-answering instincts, I decided I would try being as
un-gatekeepy as possible.  I imagined maybe she was supposed to meet someone in hackerspace, or just to hang out
here or get a tour.  But then at one point she said emphatically, with a very serious face, "I'm looking for
a job".  So I asked her for her card, told her I would put it up on the bulletin board, and if I or anyone I heard
around was looking for artists, I would mention her card.  Well yesterday I had heard a couple folks from
another in-house company talking about artwork, so i queried one of them elliptically asking if they knew any
company looking for an artist.  And surprise surprise,  their own company was looking for artists right now. 
So either the girl was responding to an ad of theirs, or Lady Serendipity was working overtime.  The guy I was
querying bolted upright and immediately sought her card that I put on the bulletin board.
Whether or not she's competent for the job at hand, she's got the best chance someone could hope for to be
considered for it.  I feel good.  

More marketing in Singapore's Little India

You know, over the past few years I've been keeping this blog, it's been anonymous. Over the same three years, i've learned to come out of my shell. Starting with facebook updates, tweets, then the company fb brandpage and company smartmob group I get consulting from.
And over time, no matter what message I'm trying to get across, I've learned that anonymity serves me little. So for now, I'll just provide some links to my other online identities, and you can sort out from there. So first, I tweet much more frequently than I blog at @walkaboutrick . Then, on facebook you can navigate to my company brand page by searching facebook for 'Really Solid Technology'. Finally, the SmartMob. What's a SmartMob? Well quite simply, I'm going about my entrepreneurial efforts without a business partner. makes it especially tough going, but it is what it is. SmartMob allows me to air out my plans on an upcoming activity or decision, and people i trust can provide their feedback to shape my activities.
That is also searchable on facebook under really Solid Technology. The product I market itself, the K-Turn, is featured on www.rstoem.com . That should pretty well cover my online persona. Now on to business updates:
Last week I had a 1.6 meter tall poster printed, and later, 200 leaflets. They all associated the hand cranked portable cell phone charger I market with an emotion , which is the feeling of helping someone. In essence, the user is taking the charger, called the KTurn, and charging someone else's phone with it who is running out of power. Emotions are very powerful things, and I surmised that the ad's imagery of a boy charging a girl's phone would be very compelling indeed, and that i would be getting calls to my own phones (as listed in the leaflets) so I could tell people which retail storeshelves to buy my product in.
Well we're at about 24 hours after the close of the ad campaign, and no calls yet. Perhaps excessively conditioned instinct by this point tells me not to expect calls. Which leads to another change in strategy.
You see, in handing out the leaflets, I had a Tamil laborer working for me for a few hours. You know, it would be more authentic if people received the ad from one of their own then from some random white guy in the middle of Little India.
Let's call this laborer Kumar. We'll call him that because that's his name and he deserves the credit I'm about to give him.
So where Kumar could have just handed out the leaflets to be people and go on, he would get engaged in conversations with them about the product. He was holding a sample charger I had given him a few days before, (he evidently had been trying it out a lot on his own because he had a lot of feedback for me) and he was demonstrating it during his one on one interactions with randomly approached folks in Little India. He made it clear that he felt he was doing better by me to talk to people instead of just to hand out cards. I decided it was lucky I had structured his compensation both on time and number of leaflets handed out, with emphasis on the time. I hadn't predicted his behavior, but I was sure happy with the result of that and more importantly, Kumar's own initiative.
So Kumar most deliberately forced me to realize that the only real way to 'market' to the Little India denizens is to have little demonstrations in public. The demos have as goal to instruct people, who've probably never seen a dynamo, how they can recharge their phones' batteries using only their own hands.
So over the next week, look for me tweeting about securing a table for demonstrating on, a space to put it up in. and hey, maybe even a microphone, amplifier, and speaker. This INSEAD is not too proud to learn marketing from a construction laborer.
Rick Sheridan

Market Testing in Singapore

Here I am market testing my company's new product, the KTurn dynamo phone charger! Readers can you guess the setting in which I am testing this?