Following are the ideas that we thought might work:
- challenging people to make us laugh
-getting ourselves slapped
-telling funny fortunes
-selling stories
-decorating match boxes and match sticks
-baby sitting
-making kids paint on us
-helping people carry their shopping bags to their cars
-giving love messages to a person from a perticular person like a performance
-music performance
-giving people massages
-making greeting cards
-making block printed wrapping papers
- making trinklets, bracelets, accessories for hair etc.- doing slipper art
-putting mehndi
-writing messages for foriegners in Hindi on beetle leaves
-sketching portraits for people
-challenging them for a game of Uno
-teaching kids how to play a song on guitar
So besides obvious learning that its not easy to earn money there were a lot of other things that i realized and learnt from them.
so we tried to earn money boht the days. though we didnt really earn anything on the first day i think it was important to go through that process because we realised how important it is to think of who your buyers would be before heading for a business . the place where you work. Aa what time of the day you are doing it. And of course how do you approach those people. I mean i actually realised its so very difficult to convince a customer about your service. Not to forget only after we went there it came to us that even what we wear and how we present ourselves makes such a difference. What shall we do so that we are different from all the other people out there trying to sell things. i think going ther on the first day also helped us know our audience. being there for few hours and observing people did help us think what might work and what might not.
Then another thing that popped up was how sometimes you can't help it and your business just ha to stop. something simple like weather. we planeed to go to a park in the evening on the frst day to give people shoulder massages but when we were about to reach there it started raining. Nothing actually went wrong but we just couldn't earn because of an external factor and we couldn't help it any way.
So out of all the ideas that we had we actually did the following
-Giving massage: while working on this we kept in mind the location . i mean where would people want to get a massage done. then what time of the day.also would they be carrying money in a park while they walk? then a place where people have more time and they are not rushing.
-Make me Laugh: the location we thought of worked biut then not the strategy. we realized that why would people come and take the challenge if they are not getting anything in return.
-Beetle leaf: this one we paid more attention on chosing our customers. we approached the foreigners because we thought thwy would be the ones who might be interested in something like getting messages written in hindi.
The next day...
So we came back home and decided what to actually do as what we did really didn't work. so we made these wrapping papers and cards using block printing technique. we tried to use whatever we could reuse
and cheapest possible raw material like newsprint sheets.so next day two of us- varshita and myself went out to sell all this. now from our first day's experience we knew we had to think about a lot of things before actually going out to sell.
Our customers could have been anyone because everyone uses wrapping papers and cards. but the kind of thing we did wouldnt sell anywhere. it was ethnic and handmade so we needed a certain kind of people to buy those.
we first thouhg of going to a stationarty shop and seeing if they are interested and buying all our papers and keeping it in their shops for sale.then we went to a residential area and tried going door to door but we soon realised people didnt realy have time to look at something we did.
so we thouhg tf a place where there are all kinds of people and who actually come there to have fun so we headed to brigade road. there too people did stop to look at our stuff but the business didnt really work. so finalyl we went to Mount carmel COllege and it worked.
in the exercise i realised that how important it is to approach people in the right way. they dont give you time so you have to tell them everything about your product in a quick and impressive way.
the biggest learnign was that discuusing proposals in a room and actually going out there to work on them is so very different.
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