koolhead17
Happy birthday to me. I am 35 years old today, can’t thank enough to the creator. It has been a great ride so far: breathing and all body parts are intact. I have a company of great friends, mentors, and believers. What else do I need?
Today will be like any another day: run/breath/coffee/calls(team/customer)/reading.
Justbooks folks have started calling me Ruskin Bond fan. I have bought 90% of his books for reading from them. My friend’s joke saying that I am recreating my childhood, in all seriousness, I am catching up with it. While growing up, reading was the last thing for me. We were small-town boys happily playing cricket, gilly danda of stealing mangoes in summer from some orchard. On some occasions when grandparents would visit, they would give me some money. It would go for a samosa or buying comics: Nagraj, Doga, Sabu, Chaca Chaudhry. There was only one comics shop in the city at the railway station.
Why do I like reading Ruskin Bond so much? I kept asking this question to myself again and again: because I could relate my childhood in his stories. Our brain is a crazy beast and, it likes and dislikes via past association.
I can relate to bathing in streams, borewells to stealing sugarcane, carrots from the filed of others. I can relate to walking hours without any purpose, I could relate to the constant confusion of what I need from my life. I could relate to love, pampering via my grandparents.
Reading Ruskin Bond is like Alice going to her wonderland. Everything of the present switched off and in dreamland. Reading Ruskin Bond is detaching from the cobwebs and walking down the priceless memory of the past.
Can you match the salary of your team member with what your well-funded competitor has offered him? Some people move for better pastures and, you cannot stop them. Change and moving on is a continuous journey of our life. We have build capitalism, our society on money and most follow it.
On the contrary, what you can do is provide a culture of love, empathy, creativity, fearlessness, and openness. And team members who believe in your journey and like these incentives and challenges will stay with you. These people will be the ones who will be an integral part of your organization, co-owners, and stakeholders. They might be perfect but no less than great humans and contributors in the journey.
Money is not the only thing in humans existence and living off well. Running a startup is challenging and is full of shock and paranoia. All we can do is minimize the risk of failures. We need a team of believers who lead from the front.
There is an India where we still celebrate Holi, Diwali, and smaller festivals.
There is an India where eating out once/month is a celebration.
There is an India where less is more.
There is an India where a child gets incentivized for a new dress by scoring well in exams.
There is an India where parents sell lands to see sons/daughters study, get educated.
There is an India where farmers are dying because no one is buying their crops or, they have no water for harvesting or all their earnings lands to the loan sharks.
There is an India where 70% of vegetables are thrown after bazaar for cattle because there is no refrigeration.
There is an India which still listens to Vivid Bharti or All India Radio
There is an India where people travel on bullock carts and where there are no schools or hospitals.
There is an India where people die bedridden because they cannot afford to go to the city.
There is an India where people are killed in the name of caste, religion.
This India is a mute spectator in the country’s progress and needs more love and attention.
I have been noticing some trends in the sales process. I have been able to connect and close most of my sales via the referral. In some cases exiting customers vouched for us and in many other friends whom I helped one or the other way in their journey.
The relationship I built in my journey in the past decade is coming back from all corners and helping me. I consider myself lucky.
What has happened to us? Have we stopped celebrating small milestones? Are we not happy with smaller wins?
The meaning of success and happiness has altered with time. We want everything huge, big. We are so much busy seeing the bigger pictures that we have forgotten seeing smaller joys.
The smell of soil after the first monsoon, the first baby step of your son/daughter, hitting ramen positivity. All these things are getting forgotten for the future.
Focussing too much on a better future without enjoying small wins in the present moment is meaningless. We will keep changing our success goalpost. It reminds me of throwing carrot and letting us chase it.
I wanted to write enormous naturalistic novels with unhappy endings, full of detailed descriptions and arresting similes, and also full of purple passages in which words were used partly for the sake of their sound.
I think there are four great motives for writing, at any rate for writing prose. They exist in different degrees in every writer, and in any one writer, the proportions will vary from time to time, according to the atmosphere in which he is living. They are:
Excerpt from Why I Write by George Orwell. (via my kindle clippings.)
Has the scent of agarabaati reminded you of your mother’s evening prayers? Or has it remained you of your ex, the fragrance of perfume at the client’s meeting?
I wonder why our brain acts this way by throwing our past. Everything comes to a halt. Positive association of it brings a smile. We end up thinking about why things did not work then and become remorseful If the scent has a history of separation.
I have been getting advice from people who are successful in selling or marketing. The problem with me is that I am not a believer in either. I apply the JTBD approach to sales. It is popular in product development.
I have written about “Jobs to be done” earlier in detail.
Pillers of Jobs to be done:
Pain: Why will someone think about buying something if an existing product has eliminated all their pain?
Desire to Progress: If a user has no desire to progress, why will he even take pain in switching. None of us like to change. People are happily using spreadsheets since inception, while many peers are making 10X return moving to workflow tools and simplifying life.
Willingness to pay: If someone has no money, what use your product is for them.
Now I understand there is another school of Andrew Chen evangelizing growth marketing and discount or freemium model in sales. It might be very successful but does not fit with my philosophy and principle I am doing my business. I have nothing against it.
I believe in delighting my customers, solving their pain points, and making them evangelist. It has served us well so far. I am also very naked, honest, unlike others in sales where you have to add lipstick, paint pictures for closing customers. I believe we are part of this journey where customers are our extended family. We are all building better ourselves together.
The same comes to marketing. We have made all our sales while being in stealth. Our customers connected us to a new set of users, we onboarded them on a few weeks trial and got them as paid users. I don’t see the point of going out, advertising or adding lipstick on my product and creating a wave of marketing.
I am not saying others who are into it or the business of marketing are flawed. It is that I do not believe in it.
There have been some instances where we let go of some customers or left money on the table for them.
I understand we are living in a startup world where everyone is hyper funded, growth business. I have all good wishes for them, most of my friends are doing it. It is just I don’t want to get into that treadmill.
How many times in our life does it happen that a close friend calls you after 5-6 years? I received A’s email after five years, our last conversation he was teaching at an engineering college in Hubli.
Fast forward now, he is a married man and on top of that a lawyer. I was happily surprised knowing about his career change. I can meet him at Tis Hazari on my next Delhi trip.
I have known A for the past 20 years. It seems like we grew up together and entered in our adulthood. Talking to A bought back our old memories, school, crush, bunking lectures, and overeating watery sabzi with paratha at our late night canteen. He was my roommate, also happened to be from Bihar and in Delhi for the 1st time of his life for seeking higher studies.
Talking to him was like we are still the same two crazy, confused, and innocent friends figuring out our journey, mapping our taste, likings. It felt like he is asking, teaching me about life from all his learning’s. What I should and I should not do. Lastly, we both laughed at knowing that I am running my own business. Like everyone else, he was also trying to set me with someone as I am getting too old and living alone.
How many such calls do we receive in our life that brings back 20 years past in front of us? It is like a movie watching movies in the background with you in it. These calls are no less than thrillers throwing memorable past full of happiness, failure, remorse, longings in front of your eye.