Practice Makes Perfect

The theme of this week was “dry run pitching”, but for us it might as well be “acquisition”. The fact that our group, The One is a little bit behind everyone else is no surprise. And this last week, we spent much of our ammunition on getting the words out there to acquire actual, potential customers that we can reach out to.

In our previous attempt at acquisition, we set up an Instagram account, began flooding it with sexy images of beautiful, sometimes quirky looking furniture pieces, and dropped a link to our landing page, in the hope that interested viewers would click over and sign up. That however ended in disappointment as the initial chart for unique visitors tailed off into nothing and our email collection spreadsheet remained empty.

This week however, we decided to ditch the digit sphere and do things the old way — aka putting up posters.

So we quickly created a poster, complete with promo codes on the little slips of paper that you can tear off at the end of the poster, in the hope that it will bait people into coming to our landing page. After printing out a stack of them, I spent the rest of the day walking around the city and posting them everywhere that I feel would give it decent exposure to pedestrians. I even accumulated over 22,000 steps and over 5 miles of walking distance that day!

And as the sun set below the horizon, our email collection spreadsheet finally came alive. One, two, three emails. It’s working! People are finally signing up! This is why I try to minimise computer time these days, the old way is still the better way.

In the end even though the growth was still a little below what we had expected, and we decided to let it grow over the next one week before putting it down on our pitch deck.

And speaking of the pitch deck, I think we really took advantage of the fact that this week’s presentation was a dry run, and that it is ok to commit mistakes. So we played around with it, putting things down that we expect to be criticised on, so that we can figure out what to avoid in the actual pitch. I think this was a good learning experience and the final pitch will be much better as a result of this.

For this coming weekend, we want to build up some more traction to give ourselves more solid things to talk about during our final pitch, and one of the possible option is to do a concierge, in which we simulate, in person, the actual flow of our service and also in the hope that we can secure a commitment to a first purchase.