This is one in a series of posts where I document my startup journey. If you just landed here, go to this link and you’ll find all the other posts in the series.
I’ve been consistently asked one question over the past several months. My then coworkers, my parents, my friends, and just about anyone I shared my business idea with blurted this out in reaction.
But why do you want to sell t-shirts?
I wrote about the fact that I’m starting my own business earlier. But I didn’t tell you what the business was going to be. So, to set the stage, my pitch went something like this:
I’m starting a new men’s grooming company with a friend. We’re going to sell premium quality men’s clothing on a subscription. You can simply sign up, set up your preferences, and receive the stuff you like right to your doorstep every month. We’re starting with t-shirts.
2 seconds of delusion when I-feel-so-good-about-myself-for-dropping-the-hottest-business-idea-the-other-person-probably-might-have-heard would follow. And then they would ask me the question.
But why do you want to sell t-shirts?
My attempts to answer this question have led me to 2 very important realisations, and I want to share them with you. If you are planning to start up for yourself some day, I hope you’d find these useful.
Realisation #1: I suck at pitching
I do. I failed many times over to convince the people around me about the real business value of what I was going to do.
But that wasn’t the scariest part. Because I was unable to sell the idea to my friends and family, I thought, that when the rubber meets the road, I would fall miserably at selling the actual product to people.
Since we funded the business with our own money, there was no need for early-stage investors. But if it hadn’t been the case, there’s a good chance that I’d still be looking for investors because I’m continuously failing to sell the idea to them.
This needs to be fixed. My current strategy is listening as much as I can. I spend several hours a day reaching out to random people (mostly on Twitter — my friend and business partner, Pavithra, takes care of Instagram) and finding out what their reactions are.
Realisation #2: Hot ideas trump practical businesses
And they shouldn’t. As cool and sexy Silicon Valley has made “ideas” sound, an idea is just that. An idea. And everybody has ideas. Only a few people act on them.
Gary Vaynerchuk would tell you this:
It’s easy to go out and come up with an “IDEA” in order to pitch and raise some money and start a business. It’s hard to navigate that idea through a 5–7–10 year timeline as the world continues to change, all the while actually making a profit.
Had I told my friends that I was going to start an IoT company, or something in AI, or even something as common as web development, I would have sounded cool and hip. And I would have sounded cool despite how far-fetched and other-worldly these business ideas actually were; despite the fact that I effectively knew nothing about the technologies involved therein.
Selling a commodity just doesn’t sound sexy. It doesn’t have a the proverbial startup flair to it. And so in my friends’ eyes, I’d immediately lose my sizzle the moment “men’s grooming” came out of my mouth. My Startup Founder pedestal would collapse and I’d be reduced to a Mudalali (the common merchant, in Sinhalese.)
“You’re the last person I thought I’d hear talking about grooming, fashion and fabrics and all this stuff,” my friends would tell me. What amuses me is that they completely miss the bigger picture. I’m not in the business of selling t-shirts at all. I’m selling convenience.
Let me try to explain. It’s easy to label Uber as a ride-hailing app. What many people don’t realize — even as they benefit from it — is that Uber’s business is not in taxis. It’s in saving commuters’ time. Similarly, AirBnB doesn’t rent apartments, they sell the ease of renting them. Facebook doesn’t sell data (to advertisers.) They sell users’ attention.
The taxis, the apartments and the data are simply the fronts to much bigger business visions. These visions are where all the value is.
At Bear Appeal, we offer free shipping to all our customers anywhere in Sri Lanka. If they don’t like our products, we arrange them to be returned with no cost to the customers, and we refund in full. Through the subscription service (which has not been launched yet,) we take the burden of having to run around to find quality clothing away from them. All these components are parts of a larger whole, which is the business of selling convenience.
The t-shirts (and all other clothing items) are just a front. The beauty of this is that we can extend this business model of selling convenience to any commodity we want, be it food, groceries, medicine, or otherwise. The possibilities are endless.
This is the appeal of an unsexy business. It’s practical. And if you’re willing to get creative and experiment with it, even though you won’t have a a bunch of investors chasing you whose money you’d conveniently end up burning through if you sold them your hot idea, you’d probably end up building a strong engine for long term growth.
This is the appeal of Bear Appeal.
Originally published on LinkedIn.
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