Activities and Costs

This week I and my team met at SF State and we did tabling for our service acquisition. We listed out team culture values we think we have. We also decided what activities our company would have to perform for us to be viable and what would be our monthly costs. What did I learn?

I thought…

I thought that tabling would be easy and relaxing for me and my teammates given that it’s something different from what we usually do. I thought that running our company wouldn’t cost much and that we would have to perform many activities by ourselves at the beginning. I also thought persuading my team to raise the price from $20 for one-day experience would be easy.

I tried…

I tried motivating my team to make tabling happen, but it turned out that we chose not so good day. The weather was cold and there were not so many students on campus. However, we collected some sign-ups from high schoolers and students. Some of them seemed curious about the idea, some of them just wanted free snacks. I’m not sure if I am overly optimistic with that, but I still think that day was a success. At the end we moved our acquisition forward.

I drew a left side of the BMC on the whiteboard to fill it out with our key activities and costs. We wrote them on sticky notes and rearranged until our finances started making sense. The biggest challenge I found was balancing what we really need, with the fact that the majority of startups get seed funding of approximately 300k.

That was the biggest reason why I started convincing my team: with the price we currently have, we would collect not enough revenue and die really fast. I asked couple people on our campus how much they would pay for such service, I got responses between $50 and $200 which gave me even more arguments, but my team seemed still unbreakable. I started wondering: why is my team not trusting me? It’s not the first time when I give arguments, but I get no response. Eventually one of my teammates conducted some pricing research by herself, and she learned that the price was too low so we raised it. But I still wonder: how can I make my team trust me more?

I also tried new way of preparing for presentation. I realized that when I present, I look at the screen too much. I decided to force myself to look just at the audience and notes in my hand when I practice. This time when I tried to be innovative, my team wasn’t so happy, even though it didn’t harm them in any way. Why is there no trust with creativity either?

I learned…

I learned that even though some of my teammates are not happy with the outcomes, it doesn’t mean I should share their feelings. Again, moving our project forward is more important than making everyone happy.

I learned that one of the ways to persuade someone to change their mind is not by telling them arguments, but by making them experience something that changed my own mind.

I learned that sometimes people are not feeling comfortable with changing established ways of doing things. When is it fine to explore, and when should I accept the ways things are and stop myself from changing them?

Next time…

Next time I will try my new way of persuading, I will be thinking even more on how to move our project forward without making everyone happy, and I will try to figure out how to deal with people being uncomfortable with changing established things. It feels like I’m trying to stretch me and my team in some dimensions for better fit. My word of the week is BALANCE.