“It’s better to be an optimist who is sometimes wrong than a pessimist who is always right.”
One of the recurring themes of my life has been to learn and evolve. The first three weeks of this year has been no less so. With constant experiences and a marked desire to grow, I venture into every new day with a fresh outlook. In 2018, our company, Infimonk launched several products including Vasant, Litmus, and Benefits.
Through Vasant we aim to make agricultural land based financing easier in India, through Benefits we delved into the world of distributing real time incentives by virtue of smart contracts and lastly, through Litmus we created a provably fair e voting platform. These products not only fulfilled their short-term objectives but landed us with much needed credibility in the space — Vasant won the Nasscom NIPP Blockchain Challenge , Benefits won the People’s Choice award at the Global Blockchain Congress and Litmus achieved the feat of Conducting the World’s First Public Poll on Blockchain.
While the above products may seem very different serving entirely different markets, what we were doing is essentially building different components under the aegis of Tarazu. Vasant helped us re skill our team to create asset backed tokens, Litmus helped us create a solution for recording multi party records on the chain, and Benefits of course helped us distribute rewards amongst various participants based on real time inputs, guided by a smart contract.
Today, as one of the Co- Founders of Tarazu - a decentralised exchange for financial and digital assets with use cases ranging from the sports industry to the government, I am proud to announce that we have reached the stage to assemble the minimum viable product and have built some solid leads for our seed round investment.
Here are the three valuable lessons that I learnt in my interactions with investors around the world on LinkedIn:
1) Learn from your mistakes: After sending multiple messages during the first week of January, the initial responses were mostly tepid. That kept us thinking of what exactly were we doing wrong. After a few days, we restructured the format of our message and included Tarazu’s URL and immediately the responsiveness substantially increased.
2) Think ahead: As the responsiveness of our potential investors increased, a common set of replies were being repeatedly sent back. With the number of scams and bubbles out there, investors seemed reluctant in a cryptocurrency product especially an ICO. Simply put, Tarazu is not an ICO and the projected returns of our product are based on actual earnings- we not only included this in our introductory proposal but also went onto design an explanatory PDF detailing the conundrums faced in the industry and how Tarazu could potentially resolve it.
3) Acknowledgement is key: While a great majority of my messages did not receive a response at all, I did, however, receive a small number of responses from investors who while declining to invest in our product — acknowledged it and wished for our success. I cannot emphasise how important a motivating factor this is for me and my team.
Acknowledgement, even on the most minuscule level, gives worth to our product and lends credence to our efforts. When a well-respected investor in our space responds, “Congratulations!” or “Keep on Going!” or “I wish you the very best!” — it truly adds meaning to the hard work that we have put in.
This has lead me to incorporate a very important change in my daily life which i feel everyone should.I have decided that whenever I am approached by anyone whether its a call centre executive trying to sell me an insurance or another entrepreneur approaching me for an investment– even if I am not interested in his or her product, I’ll take that extra effort to acknowledge it and wish them the very best, it’ll definitely make a world of difference to them and their hustle.