Ever cringed at your early entrepreneurial exploits? That's where Valerio Tommaso and I, Mark Chasins, kick off a hearty discussion about the rollercoaster ride of finding our footing in the business world. With a good-humored nod to the days when "market research" meant a mishmash of reality TV lessons and overly ambitious collegiate networking, we share tales that are as hilarious as they are enlightening. From the misconstrued concept of a target audience to the comical yet critical realization that even the most enthusiastic hustle can lead to lessons learned the hard way, our conversation is a treasure trove of entrepreneurial do's and don'ts.
Remember when university email directories were the Holy Grail for guerrilla marketers? We take a stroll down memory lane to dissect the good, the bad, and the legality-questionable strategies that peppered our journey – all before the drama of GDPR. The episode is peppered with reflections on the psychological impacts of 'free' services and the undeniable allure of exclusivity in creating lasting client relationships. We wrap up by exploring the paradox of 'skin in the game' and its role in engagement. So, grab your headphones and join us for a candid, comedic jaunt through the trials and triumphs of entrepreneurial strategy.
Ever cringed at your early entrepreneurial exploits? That's where Valerio Tommaso and I, Mark Chasins, kick off a hearty discussion about the rollercoaster ride of finding our footing in the business world. With a good-humored nod to the days when "market research" meant a mishmash of reality TV lessons and overly ambitious collegiate networking, we share tales that are as hilarious as they are enlightening. From the misconstrued concept of a target audience to the comical yet critical realization that even the most enthusiastic hustle can lead to lessons learned the hard way, our conversation is a treasure trove of entrepreneurial do's and don'ts.
Remember when university email directories were the Holy Grail for guerrilla marketers? We take a stroll down memory lane to dissect the good, the bad, and the legality-questionable strategies that peppered our journey – all before the drama of GDPR. The episode is peppered with reflections on the psychological impacts of 'free' services and the undeniable allure of exclusivity in creating lasting client relationships. We wrap up by exploring the paradox of 'skin in the game' and its role in engagement. So, grab your headphones and join us for a candid, comedic jaunt through the trials and triumphs of entrepreneurial strategy.
Check us out and send us a message on our instagram, Tik Tok and Youtube platforms @the.needle.movers www.theneedlemovers.xyz
Speaker 1:
so many things to say and but also I can see that what we did was influenced by the lack of a niche. You know you can go to market and it's a great thing to do. It's definitely a lot better than sitting and making the perfect product a hundred percent. But if you still got the wrong niche, or if you, if you haven't created a niche, and say not even the wrong one, if you haven't created a niche, then it's bloody useless. You might as well just sit with a cup of tea and, like you know, watch dexter and uh in his laboratory that's so true.
Speaker 2:
It yeah, if you haven't made the niche to go to, you're just good. Is it really going? Well, it is going to market, just not market segment. You're going to the entire ocean, the pool of whatever and you've not really broken it down. And where was we thought we had? I think, because we were just like students. Anyone can get it. Hello and welcome to a new episode of the needle movers podcast, a podcast that brings the lessons, books and concepts we wish we'd known earlier on in our lives. However, on this season season four, by the way, so kudos to us we are traversing the entrepreneur slash, passive income slash, you know, side hustle avenues that we voyaged on and hopefully, along the line, we'll get some guests on to talk about their journeys, but, as always, you're joined by your hosts, myself, mark Jason, and my co-host.
Speaker 1:
I love how we always struggle to introduce ourselves, but we're okay to introduce the other hosts.
Speaker 2:
Oh yeah, it's because I was thinking of last week, where you fully forgot yourself and I was like I'm going to do myself first, just to make sure that I get myself in there, because who knows what I'll say next time.
Speaker 1:
But yeah, no, that's fair, that's fair. So the year is about 2014, 2015 at this point. Yeah, yeah, yeah, we're showing the AGI. And what was your working knowledge of market research at this point?
Speaker 2:
Oh, oh. How do you what's minus zero? You can't be negative zero.
Speaker 1:
I had a good, good, good understanding. You know like I learned everything from the apprentice.
Speaker 2:
Oh, you know, I say minus zero. All right, let me be very honest. Market research no, I can't even scale it because I know what I did and what I know now is totally different. So by that I think I was trying to do what? The top down method, bottom up methodology, because I didn't know the names of these things. So I was like there's the pool, this is it. We'll target this type of people and a very I want to call it informal in a very disorganized way. They're not disorganized, I don't know what the word. You know what I mean Not structured, not purposeful, lack of strategy. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1:
Non-strategic.
Speaker 2:
The strategy was we'll go to this specific university and we'll find them. Maybe we'll put it on some notice boards. It was very made up. It's the type of stuff you do if you were in high school, secondary school, and someone said, said hey, you have to market, sign and be like, okay, I'm just gonna do this on a serious note, right, like by that point, I probably watched about three or four seasons of of the apprentice.
Speaker 1:
I'm not actually claiming that I learned, uh, market research from the apprentice. I actually knew squats about market research, but I found it interesting because at the time I thought all the reasonable market research is having a product or having a service. You go to a group of people that you think are your customers and you get feedback from them, right? So I thought probably quite rightly so, at the time that you know we got a product, we've got a service, we've got a university, let's put one in one together, let's see if she comes out of it.
Speaker 1:
It didn't quite go that way and at the time, probably I couldn't really see why it wasn't the right thing to do. Because, as I watched the Apprentice on TV, that was quite straightforward, right, like you know, you get the feedback, you implement the feedback and that's the end of it. But what I didn't realize is that if you go to the wrong market, you might get the wrong feedback. It's like you know, you've got a box. If you push it into the box, shit is going to come out of it. The box is not magical in some way, it's not magical at all.
Speaker 2:
And the problem is, yeah, putting shit, because when you say putting shit into the box, that sounds like if you put something. But no, we were putting absolute shit. We were feeding the book like yeah, I the gun home mentality, like I a, for emphasis, like enthusiasm. I should say there was enthusiasm, even when there was term um, turmoil or obstacles. We stayed in few enthusiastic and we were like we're gonna get this to market. So, going there and it isn't a small feat Like you have to take it to market. Even I love to compare everything to this podcast. Even with this, we just like have to release it.
Speaker 2:
This one's not being going to and get into the stage where it's like let the audience tell us. Let's not like we can do things ourselves, but also let them tell us, but then we have to get to market. Now, what we brought, or or the market we tried to find, actually the market we were going for, um, we, we went cold, like it's the coldest open we could do. Right, there was, there was nothing there. There was that they who are? We don't worry about that. We'll tell you in the first meeting. Just sign up to this welcoming of you. We'll tell you in the first meeting. Just let us here's a quick pitch come meet us, and it's like there was other things we could have done that would have made our reception or, you know, response warmer.
Speaker 2:
And I say this because I know when you're calling like companies and stuff, you more or less have to go in cold because, unless you've got a big advertisement or something, you have to be there like, hey, this is a is a service. But with students you have a multitude of options that can get you in front of their face, and it doesn't have to be like, let's say, illegitimate, like you put something up and then hope no one takes it down. You could easily get access, especially by the fact that we were all alumni graduates with, uh, good career trajectories. That would have meant that we'd that we'd probably be requested to do stuff. Instead, we were like, nah, let's not even utilize that, let's just try it ourselves. And that's part of the insecurity, I assume, like why else would we go about it that way?
Speaker 1:
Yeah, it's also part of what a good cultural mentor might tell us or might tell you, or listens or whatever that will take you onto quote, unquote the correct path, because we didn't have the different options. We knew we could have gone straight to the students and we're going to talk to that in a second and our guerrilla marketing, uh kind of approach. We knew we could have gone through societies and clubs we were part of, with which we had connections with. So you know, it was quite a straightforward entrance. We could have gone through the career center, which we also had connections with. But interestingly, I remember that when we were thinking about all the different approaches, we thought they were all equal in a way. You know you can either directly approach the students, or you can kind of like walk through, let's go like the leads and get those uh, um, those avenues, um, established, or you can go through the career center.
Speaker 1:
But I remember, probably quite specifically, that by going through societies or going through a career, I felt like I was giving something away, like maybe like giving away a little bit of control or power. But what? What I didn't see is that going through a career center or a club or a society was actually a form of a warm introduction. And the message coming from the president of a society, the president of a club, the career center advisor, etc. That's a person that is already trusted by the members. And the message coming from them saying, hey, we're offering this particular session. It's tailored for X, y and Z. Why don't you join? Very, very different message from saying hey, I'm valerio from uh sprout, or like I'm trying to say spruce. Yeah, do you want to come and attend a session? Sorry, who the fuck are you?
Speaker 2:
I also to add on to that. I also think about the fact that if we weren't going to like these um associates, associations, these groups, these um clubs, these, whatever they are, and not pitching it to them like what held I understand it's the we're taking some aspects out, but I'm trying to remember what was the pushback and we had, because if we're not capable because what was going through my mind was, if we're not capable of explaining it to them and don't have the confidence to them, how, how are we going to direct to the customer? You know what I mean. So if that was anything, if that was any part of a reason, we didn't go. We were like, oh, they won't understand. What do you mean? They are the access to the pools and I think, just that breakdown, when you said about market research, that breakdown to say, oh, but which societies would fit? This is more depth than just saying the university name. You know what I mean. And so it was like that.
Speaker 2:
That was an aspect that could have been deep, like, of course, now, and maybe, maybe then, we had an inkling of like all the things that could have been, uh, much more fine and even still, even if we just chosen one to start with and seen how it played, like do a trial and say, but then still, that's not extrapolatable.
Speaker 2:
Because I've just gone to like the acs, the afro caribbean society, and they're like, nah, it's not for us. And then I go to I don't even know the st john ambulance one and they're like we're into this, that doesn't mean you know anything, there's no correlation, it's just two random groups. So it's like knowing our demographic, knowing the niche, knowing, uh, that there's these societies, and which ones can we have access to and which ones do we have a rapport with and which one gives us the most likely to spread it? And are we confident in the message we're sending and is this the best way to broadcast it? And I guess one question actually that probably kept coming to us is what do we offer them back? Like which is funny, we're offering growth and career and like a good job. We're like, oh, but what can we offer the society? Are you kidding me? How is that not something they would want? It's weird to consider yeah and um.
Speaker 1:
I think that goes back to talking in terms of what other people's interest is. Um, I think we talked about this book in the past called um how to win friends, influence People, and one of the golden rules in that was always talk in terms of other people's interests, and that was such an easy way of getting through right. Most clubs and societies that want to do well and most offices in those clubs and societies would have wanted some sort of a free added value service for the members, and being able to offer that to them would have been such an easy way of getting that sort of warm introduction. As a matter of fact, we probably would have had to go to a space where we would have offered limited spaces, but we didn't quite see it like that and instead we went on the guerrilla marketing route oh god, we went direct to how many people did we say do you remember how many?
Speaker 2:
we managed to sign up, so let's let's give a little bit.
Speaker 1:
We talk about how we did the exact oh god yeah so, uh, in our university, uh, we then this this was pre-gDPR, by the way, way before that.
Speaker 2:
Allegedly, everything is allegedly.
Speaker 1:
Allegedly, we used to be given this university email address. As a matter of fact, I think it's still open, but the things that you get access to are limited. Now and way back then, allegedly, you used to get access to every single person in the university and their email address, select 750 contacts, and you could practically just email out a bunch of students. But, even better, you could tell what courses they were part of, because the university email address uses letters to indicate what course you're part of. So, for example, me stands for mechanical engineering. Um, I forgot what the others were, but essentially you could tailor who the message went out to, and I think we spent the good part of a few hours, probably sending about 2-3 thousand emails.
Speaker 2:
Yep 100%. How many bytes?
Speaker 1:
We got very efficient with that From memory. From memory, I think we had 6 bytes.
Speaker 2:
That's exactly what I think as well. We had six bites and we were maybe seven, maybe. I say that like that's a big difference, and I think one was a no-show. That's why I think it might have been seven.
Speaker 1:
Well, there's a lot of no-shows, but yeah but that kind of shows, you know, not thinking about the niche, not thinking about what they call distribution channels. So where is it that people hang out that you can get access to so that you can get favorable positions, or face-to-face access to the people that you can target? And the distribution channels is something that they speak quite a lot in the marketing module of MBA is about understanding where people hang out. And if you can understand where people hang out, then suddenly you can figure out where you need to go and put your advertisements, where you need to put your posters, et cetera, et cetera. Us, on the other hand, we thought fuck the distribution channels. What we're going to do is go straight to the people. We don't want our message to be diluted, we don't want to be dealing with intermediary. What we're going to do is that we're going to speak directly to the folks. Give us to the people we sent.
Speaker 2:
Well, yeah, I wouldn't even call it gun ho, but I would say that we were very like yes, it makes sense, let's go to that. We can, we can talk directly to them and they'll understand it, which is funny because that blast that in. Do you know where that alleged GDPR? Like hack of um, like sending out emails where we I'd used it before. Back then there was this space race on Dropbox and I take it You're're gonna have to give some context, okay, so dropbox. I'll start with what dropbox is. It's the.
Speaker 2:
It's a storage, it's an online storage place so you can just chuck as many files on and it gives you like up to three terabytes actually, not three terabytes, a couple gigabytes, right, not that much space, but back then it was a lot, especially in university, when this thing was just beginning to exist, right, and so you'd be able to put projects in and to expand it. As a university student, you could have the option to refer people, because they were like you got more people to come onto the platform early days, of course, therefore, you get more space. So then, once we found out that you could have the list of every single um email address allegedly, uh, I'd use it to like send just a referral link and just see if there was any bytes. And there were some bytes, but the conversion ratio with that was like, like we say thousands and you'd get like 20, but 20 was still uh, incremental increase in your storage space, which probably gave us the idea later on down the line of this could be used.
Speaker 2:
The funny thing was that, knowing ourselves if someone had sent us any link, delete would have been the first thing we did, because it's like I don't know this person, I don't know this email. I got work to do. What is all this about? So it was never from the way. The reason I'm bringing this up is because it wasn't from the consumer's mindset. It was 100% from us as, like distributors, we was like it's so easy to do, we've got all these email address, we could just send it out. That's the best thing to do. But it was not from the mindset of if I'm someone who fulfills this niche and I'm receiving this, what is the? You know what's my mentality on this? We? I guess it was from the from the content point of view, but from the way it reached out to them. It didn't come through a channel that would be like I don't know. Much more respected maybe is how I'd look at it, right.
Speaker 1:
Yeah.
Speaker 2:
Trusted, yeah, trusted, is how I'd look at it. Right, yeah, trusted, yeah trusted, and that's another lesson. There's so many lessons. There's always a lesson, but that was the part that I'm like ah, there's things we could have done. There's so many things, of course, we could have done.
Speaker 2:
But in any case, we did go fishing, we did pull some fish, we pulled several fish, and then it was about how would we meet them? Was it, would we do it through call? But then we'd known a bit about sales. Okay, more tangential information, I think at this point. Where did we learn from sales? Do you know about multi-level marketing schemes? Because we would go to a number of seminars and there was, um, I can't mention the company names because you know there was a pharmaceutical one that tried to pull us in and the way they'd pull us in, of course, if you know what labor market and they get your friends to bring you in. But besides that, they do lots of seminars which give you that like encouragement. But a key factor is in person contact, like if you're going to sell something, be in person so we have you waste their time, yeah of course, exactly so, from these, these attendances to these, um, these things, we're like we have to be in front of them and that's well.
Speaker 2:
I don't believe we made call. I think we did call some people, but that was only because they were unavailable. And remember, we're working full time at this point, so we're doing our best to get to these places and then what's it called, and then meet these people, but the big part of it was let's actually go meet them. I think it's going to be better in terms of making sure they understand what we're selling and that he can meet us and trust us and get that rapport like build trust.
Speaker 1:
So we went through this whole effort of two to three hours of emailing, getting straight to the source, because you know we don't want to get any middlemen and we don't want people to ask us for money. Because you know that was the mentality. We set some appointments up because you know we have those six, seven people that responded back to us, and then we go to Brunel for face-to-face meetings. I was starting to smell victory somewhere along the lines there. I was like, if we get six people, let's say, and we get some case studies out of it and we are able to demonstrate that what we're doing works, then they can almost be the testimonials testimonies for the work that is proof in the concept, right, and not only will be able to demonstrate them to other people within the university, and then we'll get more.
Speaker 1:
I was gonna put a fame button and it's not fame, but we'll get more people signing up, but also we can go to the industry and say, hey, look at what we've done, look at the caliber of those people, do you want to work with us? And to be fair, I think the logic wasn't terrible. I think we were on to something there, because social proof and having the ability to demonstrate what you've done is quite key nowadays to make sure that you're trusted, to make sure that you can business with others. But just because you've got a good strategy on how you can grow doesn't mean that everything that happens before that was actually good, because, as mark will tell you in a second, the meetings were not that great oh god I, if I had a better memory, I'd love to say like, at what stages we should have been able to tell like again.
Speaker 2:
There's so many books I've read since just about the art of negotiation, and the small hint of that is, instead of saying you're right, if you don't have the person saying that's right, they're probably not agreeing with you. They're like yeah, you're right. You're right If they're not saying that's right and have taken it internally, they're probably not really agreeing with you. But we had these sit down meetings. I can't remember how long they've lasted what 15, 20, maybe 30 minutes max, and maybe less.
Speaker 1:
I feel like they were like an hour each. I don't know what your memory is that.
Speaker 2:
I don't know Maybe that's when I checked out but we would sit down sometimes together with them, or mostly in separate, I think, but we'd go have conversations with them and set up that they'd like there'd be a follow up, because you need the follow up Now. Did we give them a task to do, or did we just say here's the follow up?
Speaker 1:
Well, what it was is that we sat down with them, we got some initial, we were forming the foundation. So we're trying to figure out what courses they go on. We were trying to figure out what are their aspirations, who they want to work for, what do they do extracurricularly, because the idea is that we wanted to understand where they were. We wanted to understand where they wanted to be, and then the idea is that our next meetings were going to be about how do you bridge the gap between point A and point B and yes, we did give them some tasks to go away with, which was to understand and come back to us to tell us where is it that you want to be? And then, from there, the idea was that we were going to be setting up our follow-ups or one-to-ones that were going to help them and give them that value. It's fair to say that, out of the six people, we had an astonishing 0% response rate.
Speaker 2:
And we chased. We did it. Don't get it twisted. I'm sure we followed up as well, like, hey, what's going on? There's no one Like each one. Hey, we need it. Actually, that's a lie. I'm pretty sure some people played us on a bit longer. They were like, I just need a bit time, I'll, I'll message them. And then just went stale. And part part of it going stale was even our follow-up. I swear we just gave up on them after, but it probably was after a few months.
Speaker 2:
We were like you know what, screw this, because of course there's um, there's uni assignments and all these things, but you have to convince them to prioritize this on top of that. But also it's like we can blame them. I could easily blame them, which I think at the time fully did. Fully was like these people don't understand why are they not taking any important blah, blah, blah, blah? And now I'm like yo, my salesman bitch was horrible. It was the fact that they we got down to six and couldn't retain one to like follow through with it, and that was enough to be to be crazy enough. That was enough to be like you know what we tried, we did, we did it, we did everything, and I think that was it. You know, when I started earlier saying about, hey, we made it to market. It's a a good thing, it is true, but I had that mentality back then too and I was like we did it, we got to market. Whatever happens in market, it's none of my business, is the, it's the. Yeah, it was not the mindset, and it was like a lot of, um, terrible steps towards, uh, uh, uh, inevitable, let's say, conclusion. Right, if it makes sense, like it's funny enough now, because when I think of just a lot of things I think of, basically, and a lot of my mindset is driven by if this was given to me as an assignment, I do it now.
Speaker 2:
Back then it was like a uni assignment, but now it's like if this was a work project, I'd be able to do it, and that was driven by just some personal stuff that, like, my mom would not care. Uh, if you said you could, weren't able to do something, she'd make you just do it until you could do it right. So I've always had that in. So then this one where we went about it in that approach we got no responses.
Speaker 2:
If this was going to be graded, do you think we'd have got no responses like if this, this was our own thing, that we were choosing to do, so it was very easy to like stop it or be like it's their fault and stuff and not try to make sure there's an achievement because it's our own metrics, we're our own bosses and we were following it in that way. But I'm fully cognizant of the fact that if someone had said, hey, you have x period of time to get y amount of people to showcase said product and then get them like, get this retention rate, I I don't know about you, val, but for me I'm sure, with that being like a um accountability factor, it would have made a somewhat difference to my mindset back then so great you mentioned that?
Speaker 1:
because fundamentally, there is one or two concepts at play here Us not doing anything as a consequence of not getting a response and not following up, and also them not doing anything as a consequence of us emailing them has got one share factor in between. Neither them nor us had any skin in the game. Our salary and our livelihood didn't depend on us getting them, but also their grades, and whatever they were doing had no implications around whether they were going to respond to us or not. Which brings me on to the next topic, which is for next week, which is the benefit of not making anything free, so making people pay for things, and the concepts of making people sticky and giving them exclusivity. That, in turn, can help with the engagement of a potential client, but we'll leave that for next week.
Speaker 2:
The benefits of sunk cost fantasy. Well, with that being said, of course, I hope you've enjoyed this episode. Find us everywhere If we're still posting. That's amazing, because I know I'm not, but still Thenickmillmovers. I've been one of your hosts, Mark Chasins.