Ok so we have the main fuselage to be designed, and then interiors. We got interiors done by Maserati. And then we steal a design from the web and manufacture the parts and join them with the best nuts. No 3D printing – just regular milling and cutting in a factory.

Because we made this in China and used Indian software for Avionics – we made the plane 20% cheaper. So we’re selling it 30% cheaper. For a $300M plane – that’s good savings.

We call the celebs and Airline owners for a party in France. Maybe the Arabs too – just cause they’re uber-cool.

All good so far?

But the party ends, people burp and fart the good food out – and leave.

No one bought the plane. They are all asking ‘is it safe to buy – who else is buying’ ?

And this is where Boeing and Airbus will win – every time. They have data to back up their own conviction on the design, the avionics, the fuel pumps, the engineering support, the flight experience, and the safety. They’ve been testing those metal birds since forever now.

So when a newcomer comes in with the same ‘technical’ configuration – the only question to ask is ‘is it safe to buy’. All other criteria are met.

We found the right audience. We made the product 30% cheaper. We threw the party. But they didn’t buy.

We didn’t have the data.

…but its never been done before…

A dollar everytime I hear this – and I’ll definitely be rich.

Its natural – no one likes change. But we all cherish success. Disruption brings innovation. Innovation is this big word that apparently is the base camp to the summit – success.

I’ve had this with customers, partners, and employees. My parents are fed up of this moonshot thinking I carry. I often end up failing because of exactly this though.

If you are participating in any kind of an innovation, here are my 3 reasons you should be shooting for something impossible today:

1. Gain perspective.

In the pursuit of the impossible – you’ll end up someplace you never thought you can. Its a strange cognitive power that develops when your mind is thinking of the impossible. And this power makes you see the problem much much more clearly. Ask someone who’s been practicing maths for 30 years – he’ll explain gravity so much more accurately than someone who’s studied Medicine.

2. Get the disbeliever’s attention

The disbeliever near you is a powerful force and plays a crucial role in your conviction towards the impossible. When you present the impossible – the disbeliever will take notice and participate.

Every team must have a devil’s advocate. You’ll hire yours right away.

3. Find new loopholes

When you’re designing something to send a person to the moon – you tend to find out new opportunities. New ideas. New loopholes. New money.

Its such a precious commodity – time. Only 24 hours – for all of us. But we all have time for our priorities. By making the impossible your priority – your time is in fact spent better – than racing towards the achievable.

…if we don’t pay our vendors on time, how can we expect our customers to pay us on time…

This was part of an email we received from a customer today. They’re beyond prompt – they’re fanatical about paying us on time. Every time.

I had heard somewhere that the speed with which a business pays out is just a shade slower than the speed at which the business receives money.

Are you paying your dues on time?

Yes – yes a computer can do it. But I don’t like a computer deciding for me. Unless they’re bots I’m killing.

Computable situations can be insured. There’s a whole world of indexes that work on this.

But for those ‘gut decisions’ – there’s only a single parameter you need to measure. If its a spade – what are you calling it?

Call a spade – exactly that.

Rip the leather off the ball. Remove the fluff. Get to the point. Be honest. Call a spade when you see one. But call it a spade even if it gets everyone in the room jittery.

Spades have that notorious tag associated with them – they make everyone jittery.

If you are a marketer, this may help.

1. Expose yourself to 3 news items a week about your favorite brand. Doesn’t matter if its PlayBoy that you favor the most as a brand.

When you will get some of your myths and miunderstandings beat outta you about your favorite brand – you’ll know whether to continue supporting the brand or not.

2. Kickstarter. See who doesn’t mind spending what on whom. Who are the people funding the projects on kickstarter. What kind of money are the ideas getting. Which ideas are not meeting their fund targets.

The crowdsource movement brings a simple theory – community decisions spark trends. Knowledge of trends before they arrive can be invaluable.

3. YouTube – its the world’s second largest search engine after Google owns it. For the less geeky, this literally transcends into 2 separate engines that are supplying content to you. That white UI throws out text, images,and gibberish. The red and grey UI throws out badly tagged videos.

Watching your favoriteshows doesn’t count. Look for new videos, see trending videos, and most importantly, keep a tab on the success curve of a video that crosses 1 million mark.

When LinkedIn sends in a discount coupon – we all open it.

Great service at decent discounted prices.

But we all like discounts. There’s nothing to be ashamed of. The trick as a sales guy is to know that your audience knows it. So bump up prices and offer discounts.

But in our connected world – comparative buying is but expected. And such tricks don’t last. When we’re asking each other for inputs – brands often appear in these discussions. There’s a reason why Apple sells out its 1st day stock in 24 hours. Any retailer would kill to be in such a place.

Have you seen Apple offer discounts?

And those who eventually sign the check are always happy to reduce the number they’re sanctioning. We all love discounts.

Discounts are treated as bad by us marketing folks. It’s pretty much the last thing you can throw at your prospect. Right when everything else has failed.

But that’s perhaps a wrong way to look at it. LinkedIn sending a discount coupon doesn’t beg me to sign up. It asks me to ‘come back‘. There’s a mile and a half between the 2 words.

There is so much honesty in ‘come back’. ‘Get 20% off’ is so impersonal. Note there’s no please before the ‘come back’.

‘Come back’ makes me feel I’m being pampered. And this is the success of a newsletter. WHAT you say followed by HOW you put it.

A DISCOUNT followed by COME BACK.

Some would call it weepy and beggy. But we all know who’s really benefiting here.

If you agree – that you will take my call anytime I call you – tells me that you are willing to hear from me. You have willfully agreed to listen to me. You know I will try to sell myself, but you’re ok with it.

In this noisy environment we live in, why would a stranger ever open your email and read if you’re not solving their problem. Or at least entertaining them?

So logic dictates that the person receiving your email either knows you (and trusts you) or you are saying something in the mailer that will solve his problem.

Most marketers are whetted on this - do you know your customer’s problem. And most products fail because of this – do you know your customer’s problem.

The way to work around that is by using content as a weapon.

Make a mailer – send it to 10 people. See how they respond.
Then make a second mailer (learning from the first) – send to another 10 people. See how they respond.
Then make a 3rd mailer (learning from the first 2) – send to another 10 people. See how they respond.

If this ‘iterative learning’ is executed well – by the Nth mailer, you’d have built up a targeted list of willing listeners who will not just read your mailer – but actually use your product and benefit from it.

{N depends on how accurate your measurements are}

Chamath was stiff. But he does give some interesting tips on how to manage time. Shruti is a true marketer. Always thinking about the customer.

I have used no post-production effects and minimal color corrections to get the look. Of course I was using the full frame Canon 5D Mark II for this shoot. Why that’s important – in another post.

Now for the good stuff… take time with this.

For tip#1, I assume you have some basic understanding of how white balance works and what Depth of Field is. Or at least you’ve used some kind of manual settings on your camera and you understand what happens when you open the aperture too much or too little. Feel free to ask your questions in the comments.

1. Get light right. 

You should already know that the light source should always be behind the camera. However, sometimes a direct ‘behind light’ can cause reflections on spectacles and other face-props.

If you interview someone with gold teeth or large shiny ‘Sunil Shetty Sunglasses’ – you’ll know what I mean.

I hope I never have to interview Sunil Shetty with Gold teeth. Uggghh…. I think I just lost my appetite for the lunch mutton. 

To exploit lighting in any shoot, try to find a corner that has the most ‘ambient’ light. This is the total overall lumens available in the region that the camera will see. Not the light on the subject – this is the overall light.

This is easy to achieve with deep focus (or deep Depth of Field- DoF). Simply because your camera is looking at a pretty flat object in space. But with shallower depth of fields this challenge escalates quickly since you have to ‘guess’ what light value will be like in that 3D space where the person’s head will come and sit.

Here’s the tip – before your interviewee arrives, find the spot, put in a dummy face and set the white balance. Once you get the balance right – things go pretty smooth from there.

The thing to be concerned about here is that many times its a compromise. You’ll get good light but dark or annoying backgrounds. Other cases you’ll get a fantastic background but poor ambient light.

Just look around and let your eyes do the calculations.

Here’s another tip – squint your eyes until what you are seeing becomes fuzzy. Then try to point out the brightest object your eyes can see. If you cannot identify a single point – you’re good. If your squinted eyes see a light source – return to start. And go look for a better spot.

2. Cheating your ears.

In Naveen’s video about raising money, he actually said the line ‘its a feeling’ after ‘I’m gonna die’. But I don’t think you can make the difference out.

That ‘eye blink’ effect is nothing else but a fade out of the first footage and fade-in of the second. However here’s the tip – I just cut out a sample of the background foley and inserted into the ‘blank’ part. So it sounds like you’ve not left the room, just blinked your eye.

Have you seen this effect somewhere else? Most ‘drama’ scenes use this technique. Where the footage will fade in and out but the soundtrack and score will remain unchanged.

and then… Morgan Freeman will provide the voice over and the world will be happy again.

3. Snap cuts

There are parts where you suddenly come closer to the subject and then go back. I wasn’t controlling the camera. That’s a post-production effect. Or simply called post-effect.

This tricks the eyes and makes you feel like you’ve come closer to the subject. This post-effect works well for face shots. Or for shots when you want to emphasize a part of the view. Here’s an example:

As you can see, the camera first sees the ‘big picture’ and then zooms into ‘the detail’.

Note – if you’ve carefully watched the videos I have shared above, you’ll realize how the same technique generates a different result. The bird, the ocean, the sun and the light change the story completely !

Disclaimer: I’m not ‘professionally’ trained by an academy on photography and film making. I’m a story teller who uses tools like cameras and computers (and my doodle pad) to tell stories. I apologize in advance if any of the technical words aren’t industry accepted terminologies. I only intend to share what I know. Please do consider sharing my blog/posts with people who you think would like to have conversations with me around my areas of interest. Many thanks in advance !

Do you feel regard for the business? Will you go check them out the next time you are on MG Road? Are you searching on gogle maps right now?

The thing to think for you my friend is that your content …..is always free. Then why are they not hogging your content the way you had envisioned?

In all sincerity, they may indeed be consuming your content. They may even be enjoying it, discussing it at parties, during a game of tennis, or just over email. But because you don’t have validated feedback from your audience, you may not know what needs changing.

In the most extreme cases, you might be making the exact same mistakes that got you in this soup in the first place. The soup being where they are ignoring your freebies.

Here’s a tip on seeing if the students are awake or not during your presentation – Stop talking…..

Just be quiet for a few weeks. Then talk again – did you see heads lift up? Did you catch their attention? Drop your nuke now if they’re listening.

Pauses are critical in any script. And if your outbound communication is verbose, sooner or later, the students are bound to doze off….

But today I had the experience of the other kind. My ideas spawned a conversation. Not just an average kind. An epic kind…

Here are my top 3 tips to make your idea spawn an epic conversation:

Approach the right audience

If you are talking about angling, a seasoned fisherman has no interest. Anglers are hobby people. Seasoned fishermen do it for the money. Loads of difference.

If your idea makes money, rest assured everyone wants to hear about it. If your idea can make money, choose your audience carefully.

Ideas about how to make Justin Beiber look more gay can wait.

Be confident

Nothing speaks poorer of your idea than an under-confident pitch. Confidence isn’t proportional to aggression. Its proportional to knowledge and data. If you have found yourself struggling to support the idea with facts – you shud pinch yourself. High chance you are dreaming.

Speak honest

If you don’t know it, apologize, take a note and find it out. But never try to bullshit to win confidence with someone. This might hurt you – people are smarter than you think they are.

Bonus tip

Let the other guy speak. I’m pretty verbose myself and I have to control the urge to interrupt. But conversations are 2 way. Don’t abuse someone’s attention. Let her have her say too.

What are your tips? Shouldn’t you share …? Oh common, I shared mine… go for it.