March 2015 - Haseeb Awan

Innovate or Sell first ?

We innovate to solve a problem in a better way in a way that it is lucrative for your customer to change their habits & start using your product

Without innovation, it is hard to distinguish yourself once you launch a product due to lack of incentive.

Common belief is that a product need to be 10x better than the existing alternative. Now this 10X term is somewhat exaggeration but to explain how better a product should be, because it is very hard to quantify alternative solutions. There should be a difference of day & night and compel the user to say Waoo.

Innovation & selling go together, however, the order in which they come differentiate if it’s a research or startup.

In Startup, you sell first by finding the problem & then innovative on how to solve the problem efficiently. Risk in this approach is that, you might not be able to innovate an efficient way.

In Research, you innovate first because you think there is a better way to do something, and then try to find the customers who have the problem. Here the risk is if it is a commercially viable product or not.

Now it is up to an individual to choose what is the biggest risk for him, fail to innovate after discovering the problem or fail to sell after innovating!

I will choose innovation risk over selling risk unless I innovate on how to manufacture water based engine.

Don’t Mix Email & Telephone Calls

TL;DR

Use Verbal/Written communication appropriately. Have a purpose for every communication and based on that choose the appropriate medium.

Thoughts :

Communication is one of the most important aspect of our everyday life. We communicate to understand, assist, or help each other.

Here is a random order, in which I think we started communication

– Hand Signals

– Drawing the hand signals

– Drawing and sending those hand signals

– Invented some sounds to replace the hand signals

– Standardized these sounds

– Converted these sounds into symbols / characters

– Improved on these characters and standardized these sounds

– Language was invented

So now we have two forms of communication

Vocal & written ( I am excluding Body language here )

For Distant people, we invented Postal Mail ( Email/Fax) & Telephone to communicate efficiently. Both of them have different purposes to communicate. Usually, I have came across when they are not used at the right time, which causes problems. I often find hard to balance between both of them as well, since we tend to use the easiest tool at that point of time. Such as we will call and leave a voicemail, when we know that the person will not be available on desk. We will draft an email in a tone that the other person feels bad. In addition, we also might call the person and poorly communicate a deal to give our self-benefit of doubt.

All of these are wrong practices and should be avoided. I have not yet mastered this and constantly try to improve based on feedback and results. Just make sure, the purpose of communication have been achieved.

Monthly Archives: March 2015

Innovate or Sell first ?

Don’t Mix Email & Telephone Calls