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?

How to ride a Mongolian Horse

Inner Mongolia, Tibet, and Indonesia

So with the Nepal trek closed and an open summer ahead of me, I took up a very enticing invitation to travel in Tibet. But as long as we’d be in the hinterlands, we thought we might as well visit Inner Mongolia also.
First, I learned that if there was ever a battle for the most representation on tours between mainland Chinese and foreigners, the Chinese won long, long ago. I saw no other foreigners in Inner Mongolia, and on the plateau our foreigner group was outnumbered by Mainland tourists by at least 10-1.
The most famous land feature in Inner Mongolia are the grasslands, on which ride the famed Mongolian horses, whose masters reside in the equally famous roundhouses, eating giant servings of pure lamb meat. The visits to the Mongolian villages are a little touristy, with brief trots on horses, Karaoke lunches, and ongoing negotiations for goods and services. But when you can get away from these small negatives for a moment, and just look out over the expanse of land, and sit and watch the sunset, it’s really relaxing and pleasant. And the lamb was *delicious*, worth every jiao. But back to the horse-back rides: The Mongolian tour directors only let you ride very slowly, but I knew they can ride the horses much faster. How to get them to do that? To answer that question, I took a page from the Cargo Cultists of post-World War II. The Mongolians wear iconic, large brimmed cowboy-style hats, and I was watching some of them hit the horses on the rump to speed them up. (I happened to buy such a hat because I thought it looked cool). Adding a shred of creativity, I took my new hat off, and whapped my horse on the rump with it, and the beast TOOK OFF! I had never been so fast on a horse in my life, and when my initial surprise wore off, the speed was really enjoyable – the horses glide along more smoothly and comfortably at speed than they do in trot. As soon as my horse had gotten this impulse, my Mongolian minder shouted from his increasingly distant point “Drop the hat! Drop the hat!” no doubt hoping desperately that my stilted Chinese possessed the relevant vocabulary. I savored the experience for a few final, memorable seconds before I decided to be an obedient tourist and threw off the cowboy hat. I inferred, correctly that the hat is used in training so that the horses respond to it uniquely.
The grasslands turned out to be lacking in grass in favor of small shrubs. It turned out there were consequences of this which we learned through horseback riding. My horse was tripping every so often on apparently nothing.
“Me: My horse seems so tired . . . “
“Mongolian cowgirl: Didn’t you notice how skinny he is? The rain has been light the last year, the grass for him to eat so little”.
Turns out the horse was indeed scrawny, and I felt bad. I thought that in the US we solved these kinds of shortages with hay cultivation, markets, and transportation, but I’m not a farmer so what do I know . . . By contrast in the opposite corner of the country, the Tibetans definitely have hay figured out to feed their yaks . . .
Following a punctuating bubble bath party back in a Beijing Sanlitun nightspot we proceeded to the Tibetan plateau. If you ever gain the inclination to visit Tibet, please please take the pressure acclimatising train the 48 hour train in and don’t fly. The entire south-western third of China sits on a plateau. So we’re talking about a vast swath of planet Earth raised 4000 meters, or 13000 feet, above sea level. Turns out that the meter-feet conversion is important, because to an ear accustomed to customary units, the number 4000 sounds harmless enough. When the airplane sets down, the airport pharmacy (by the way, the airport has a pharmacy) chiefly sells oxygen bottles. And they are *very* necessary if you come into the country by airplane. Fatigue and headaches settle in quickly, and days later we’re making out way to 5000 Meters (16,500 feet) at Everest Base Camp. More than half of our troupe suffered altitude sickness at this altitude, and while the view of Mt. Everest was valuable, I suspect the sickest among us were unsure their malady-stricken stay at the camp was worth the photos.
We took the train back from Lhasa, and the rolling hills covered in (grassy) grasslands grazed by yaks was delightful. Our train passed through the highest train station in the world, a factoid which the train PA system dutifully recognized. The train sped straight through this notable station without stopping – I decided it was a tribute to the host country’s sense of face that they built this station – because there were no inhabitants, buildings, or crops to justify the station's existence.
Well with these travels completed, there really was only one more logical destination to pursue. Obviously I’m talking about Jakarta. Yes, with two weeks to kill, I had to go somewhere before my itinerary for a class business trek (observing and meeting with exotic tribal chieftains in Silicon Valley) kicked in. My thinking proceeded thusly: I had already visited or traveled through 70% of China’s provinces (which officially means its high time I saw as much of the US . . .). Therefore Jakarta, the rambunctious, unrestrained, burgeoning capital of Indonesia was the last backpacking itch I had to scratch. ( I'm saving Mt. Rushmore for later :) )
From an urban planning perspective, Jakarta is best compared to Los Angeles – a concrete jungle with little planning with respect to zoning and mall developments everywhere, while the megalopolis manages to avoid the street chaos of Mumbai or Delhi. I happened to show up at the opening of Ramadan (as the hedonistic revelers of the world do one big collective face-palm) which pretty much shut down recreational life in the city. That's okay - I always enjoy urban observation (I like to keep my eyes open to in any new city), experience a foreign lifestyle (I managed to observe Jakarta’s hip and beautiful while making friends with expat helicopter pilots in Social House - thanks to GN for the tip!). I skipped over to Bali in pursuit of kite-surfing. As I write I’m in Bali’s beach-chic Seminyak planning my itinerary to Lombok and the Gili islands where I hear the wind and facilities are appropriate for this.

PS, for this posts' photos, I know the bulk of mainstream readers like to see food and cultural stuff, but until the day this blog becomes reader-supported, you get what I like to post, namely . . . Solar-powered GSM phone antennae at 4000 M altitude!



and a solar powered water boiler near Sugatse!! Can there *be* anything cooler??



Since that picture I was in immense pain from a splitting migraine stemming from the reflected sunshine off the cooker. That moment was the last time I smiled that day. :(

Karmic Repair in Nepal

Holy smokes I’m in Nepal. I had some funny preconceived notions on what I would see here. For example, I thought that Kathmandu would look a lot like Darjeeling (mountain town) on steroids. I write having completed one INSEAD period since my last post.
I’m in this country on a social entrepreneurship trek. You see, before the beginning of the period, we had a choice of the following courses: Building Business in China, Building Business in India, Social Entrepreneurship in Nepal, and Building Business in Brazil. The Brazil trek got canceled for insufficient enrollment, and the remaining BRIC country’s course, Drinking Vodka in Russia, was expunged for unknown reasons. These days the talk is about BRICi, where the little I is for Indonesia. I am aching to visit that little i’s Jakarta, preferably as part of a trek in the autumn P4. Drumming up interest from my fellow INSEAD students is proving tricky, many are looking for the next sandy beach to visit on weekends . . .
One nice thing about elective courses such as these treks is that students are effectively self-selecting into affinity groups. So for example, I meet the guy who has spent his career to date with the Red Cross in sub-Saharan Africa, or the Bain consultant who worked with Technoserve on cashew supply chain optimization, also in Africa.
On this trek, we visited villages where their agricultural output has increased multiple times over allowing them to transition from subsistence farming to market participation with their surpluses. I like the examples of development initiatives where the target’s earning input has increased, as opposed to just making their life a little easier under their current income regime. This usually involves facilitating markets access. In one initiative I was part of, we were enabling lighting in a productized package for low income villagers in India. Perhaps the lighting could increase their productivity, say at night, but it was really about making the customers’ lives easier without necessarily increasing their earning power. On the other hand, it gives villagers who don’t have the income potential to buy the product something to aspire to. Seeking increased utility and status is a powerful force in capitalism – recall ‘the pursuit of happiness’, a notion whose effect on the world isn’t to be underestimated.
But it’s hard to productize the act of facilitating market access. In the case of the above village where they learned how to cross high quality strains of oranges with large size strains, or teaching drip irrigation to maximize targeted water usage without wasting it on weeds, there’s not much you can monetize except for consulting time, which is a subjectively valued product even in the first world.
We also visited a group of social entrepreneurs – they were an inspiring lot with such diverse projects in operation including breweries, training initiatives,distributed biofuel power generation, and housing conversion to traditional architecture styles. We also visited an urban housing project for the homeless, a community drinking water diversion project, and an instance of OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) in action for Nepali schoolchildren. Now here’s where I’m going to push the INSEAD brand. Whereas a student delegation from your typical, run-of-the-mill social entrepreneurship-oriented business school (ahem, Stanford) would show up on site, see some villages, take some photos, and ruminate on the airplane back home, we INSEAD students said, “Screw that, we’re cutting the original observation schedule short, and make a presentation to all the entrepreneurs we met and show them how to get the entrepreneurial ecosystem right-side-up again.” We created a brand and illustrated a pathway to bring up Nepal’s tourism, agricultural export, and hydropower industries, all under one licenseable brand (kind of like the ‘CE’ label for product safety) designed to inspire commitment in Nepalis and confidence in foreigners on their supermarket store shelves. Remember when you come to Nepal as well as your local organic supermarket storeshelf and see brand “Jaya” posted all over the place, you saw it here
first! Although seeded by our finance guy and our Red Cross worker, cheers to the consultants in our group for pushing the presentation structure along, you’re a tribute to your profession.
After the week-long class was over, we took a flight to the Himalayas and back - $140 for an affirmative response to the question, “Oh you were in Nepal, did you see Mt. Everest?”. Yes, I did, and here are the blurry pictures to prove it.
Alas, the summer is finally here. Many students are in internships with banks and consultancies. Following my unsuccessful “cross the t’s, dot the I’s” banking applications, valiant multi-weekend-in-the-Singapore-library effort at VC internships, and a few artistic stabs at industry, I’m once again mobile and traveling in Asia, my conscience restful in the knowledge that I pulled out all the networking stops at my disposal for an internship in the region.
So on deck we have Delhi starting tomorrow morning where I’ll catch the remainder of the Building Business in India folks, followed by Inner Mongolia in China, and then the holy grail of travel adventures, Tibet. My trusty cell phone camera is taking requests on what to point and shoot it at. Email them or send me a message via comment.