This phase of startup is called: Doing stunts.

Some background

It has been two-three months since we started out on our own, leaving our very well paid jobs.

Ours is a market-place, I wouldn’t bore you with details but a classic chicken and egg problem was evident from the beginning. Surprisingly we were able to get interest on one side of the market — the supply side. The supply side is actually ready to ship although at a low scale. Do things that don’t scale really worked there. I will talk about that sometime later — that’s interesting too and a lot of good learnings.

For the last couple of months, we the founders and our roommates are the customers of our product the supply side is creating. Now we really need to solve the second half of the chicken and egg problem and get real customers.

The stunt

We had some flyers printed out and delivered to us. They were lying around for while.

The supply side was getting impatient for not getting demand. I had to do something.

I thought, our target audience is in the demographic of 20–30 years of age and our apartment’s building has 12 apartments and at least 5 of them has our target audience. So, at most 10 people in our apartment building might be interested. Should we talk to them one by one? But we had already done that 2 months back when we were interviewing them to understand their needs. It shouldn’t look like we are spamming them.

Then, with a brilliant flash of genius, I thought, hey, I can put a poster in the lift, everyone uses it (except may be the first floor), and they will be caught with nothing else to stare at for a brief amount of time.

So, I put up the poster in the lift thinking, yes, at least one person will visit the website. Unfortunately, just few hours later there was a heavy rain, and the power got cut until late at night. By that time, I guess everyone would have gone up by stairs, only to repeat the process tomorrow.

Next day, I woke up and immediately went to check if the poster was intact. I was shocked and sad and infuriated, all of the three posters were missing. All of my genius went in the drain in a flash.

I tried to guess who could it be, was it the guard? or some a**hole guy from our building? or some competitor? or the adhesive itself was not strong enough?

I went to the ground floor and saw the poster lying on the floor. I picked it up. I decided I will keep putting it up again and again in the lift, lets see who wins.

So, thats what I did just now with a little extra duct tape in addition to the adhesive:

After doing it, I find it very funny. I wanted to do a startup, and now I am fighting some silly fight with someone who wouldn’t let me put my poster up.