Week 3: Facing My Fears

I nicknamed my dog “Number of Twitter Followers” because he doesn’t pay the bills but he makes me feel important.

Oh, look! It’s not a pun this week! Character development on my part.

This week has been pretty strenuous for me. Even for an uber-extrovert like yours truly, going up to random people and asking to interview them is not particularly easy.

Why would you put yourself through that?

Recent work has all been scheduling interviews and collecting information. I’ve focused on reaching out to every small business I possibly can, whether that’s a business I know of, one that a friend/acquaintance of mine has used before, or one I just randomly found on Yelp/Google Maps.

So how’s it going?

So, I’ve noticed something interesting. When in a formal setting, most personal correspondence occurs over email. When you want to ask someone a question or invite them out for a coffee chat, you’ll most likely email them (or text them on LinkedIn, which is basically the same thing anyway). That’s actually pretty different for businesses. When going on their websites, most of them only have phone numbers available, and those that have both phone and email clearly prioritize the phone line. I’ve emailed everyone I can, but I still need to reach out to the vast majority of businesses over the phone.

I was completely prepared to start calling around on Thursday, but then I realized something. If a business gets a call from someone that starts “Hi, I’m a high school student and I’m doing a project…” and then gets into asking them some pretty personal marketing information (like how much money they spend per time period on advertising), they’re probably going to suspect some kind of scam, especially if I call them on a line that’s usually used for orders and such. Honestly, I’d suspect a scam if I got a call like that.

Unfortunately, my ego is pretty fragile, and I wasn’t thrilled about the prospect of potentially being accused of being a scammer and hung up on, so I decided to try talking to businesses in person. That way, they could see that I am actually who I claim to be and not some random 40-year-old man from Wichita. (No shade to Wichita.) Therefore, on Thursday, I instead went to Willow Glen to talk to some small business owners in person!

How’d that work out for you?

I originally walked into Willow Glen with a plan for exactly which businesses I was going to talk to. Unfortunately, most of those businesses were restaurants, and I got there at 10:15 sparkling am, when literally none of them were open. So I, naturally, pivoted course a bit, and started searching for small mom-and-pop stores on the street.

My first attempt, I gave my whole spiel about being a student who’s doing a project on marketing challenges that small businesses face, and then the lady told me that she didn’t speak English. Disheartened but not defeated, I trudged on. (I’m making it sound more dramatic than it was, I just went to the next store.) Thankfully, I soon met with success, in the form of a nice lady named Antoinette who told me all about how she grew her hair salon through her Instagram presence.

Overall, I got to about three or four businesses on that trip, all of whom had different approaches to marketing and different platforms that they favored. In terms of trends, a few things seem to be constant – their reliance on word-of-mouth advertising, favoring Instagram as their primary social media platform, and not spending too much money (or any money at all) on marketing.

I’ve also conducted some other interviews outside of Willow Glen, and I have a few scheduled for next week. For the businesses that I can’t visit in person and that don’t have emails available, I guess I’ll have to call after all. Hopefully, it doesn’t go too badly.

Wow, it’s so nice to see that everything is going smoothly and you haven’t had any problems at all!

There’s two main problems that have popped up so far. Nothing too serious, but I’ll need to think about them.

First of all, when it comes to choosing businesses, I’m falling prey to the availability heuristic a bit more often than I’d like. I don’t have any kind of effective randomization process to choose the businesses that I’m interviewing – I’m essentially just choosing them based on my knowledge or the knowledge of people around me. However, there’s a pretty glaring flaw here, and I’ve noticed that in my interviews so far too.

I am far more likely to know of (and add to my list) businesses that are successful or have been successful so far. If I know of a business, odds are it’s doing well because it’s been able to get its name out there far enough that I know about it. On the other hand, businesses that are struggling more or failing are much harder to come across just because they’re not as good at getting their name out there to people like me.

This is actually pretty noticeable in my interviews. Most, if not all of the businesses I’ve interviewed, have told me that they’re satisfied with their marketing campaigns so far, since they’ve gotten enough customers to keep their businesses afloat and/or help them grow. None are too interested in changing much about their plans right now.

Honestly, this isn’t a huge deal. The fun thing about these kinds of businesses is that they all start from practically nothing or just a few customers. All I have to do to deal with this problem is ask the businesses about their early days and their struggles with marketing then. At that point, they were probably a lot less satisfied with their marketing strategies.

That point when a business is young is really where successful businesses differentiate from those that are doomed to fail at a young age. If I can identify what their struggles were back then, and maybe how they overcame those, I can help younger businesses implement whatever it is they did.

Another (smaller) problem I noticed lies with my questions. A lot of small business owners are immigrants or non-native English speakers, and the questions I’m asking include some pretty complex terms that they may not immediately understand. They’re busy people, and I shouldn’t take up too much of their time, so I have to ensure I verbally reword my questions to make them easier to understand but still convey the original concept I was trying to ask about.

Any idea what your solution’s going to look like yet?

Kind of, but my ideas are still simmering. It’s all subject to change at any point, since I haven’t gotten through too many interviews yet.

Also, I’m somewhat tempted to keep my plans a surprise. Get everyone invested, you know? Curious to see what the mystery product will be?

Hope you guys enjoyed my ramblings. See you next week!

~Maya