WEEKS OF OPPORTUNITIES

My 3 shortcut sessions on "Opportunity Creation" at Bangkok University's School of Entrepreneurship and Management (my second year working with the university) are officially over! Here is the summary of the fun-packed, intensive, and interactive sessions:

Session 1: Problem and People

• Find a "good problem" to solve by creating a scenario and constructing a story around that scenario, from context to conflict to complications along the way to climax
• Understand who experiences, struggles with, or suffers from the problem most by creating a lifelike character, who is essentially the customer persona. Want to target mothers of young babies? Not enough to state how old the mother or her baby is. We need to be able to visualize what the mom struggles with, why, and how she struggles with it. In return, we need to visualize what the baby struggles with, why, and how it struggles with the problem AND how the mom's current method of dealing with the baby's struggling is not working well enough or not working at all  

Session 2: Product

• Start with the most obvious no brainers and think further and further to refine the solution
• The students found that the best solutions most of the time come from solutions that we just blurt out without thinking about it or thinking too deep into it. For example, "clothes that don't stain," "cakes that won't make you bloat," "personal driver on demand"
• The students also found that the best solutions also come from "don't you wish we had..." moments. "Don't you wish we had a car that drove itself?" "Don't you wish we had a sponge that doesn't have to have a soft yellow sponge on one side and a hard textured green pad on the other?" (See Scrub Daddy)

Session 3: Pitching

• Great products don't always sell themselves. Entrepreneurs and their products are more or less the same entity. Entrepreneurs need to sell their products, while selling themselves all at the same time. They need to be able to show WHY they are worth their customers' or investors' time and hard-earned money, WHY they understand the problem more than anyone else, WHY they are so invested and devoted to solving the problem, and WHY they are not afraid to make complete fools out of themselves talking about a product they invented, a service they developed through trial-and-error, or a community they feel deeply passionate about
• Something is an "opportunity" when it is an "opportunity" for you to make an impact, make a difference, or make money AND when you can show others (your customers, investors, team, or community) that it is an "opportunity" for them too. Opportunities must always go both ways!
• Start your "storytelling" with the problem you are trying to solve. Why is the problem serious? Why is the problem worth solving? Who experiences the problem both knowingly and unknowingly
• Be in character. The beauty of storytelling is you can be anyone or anything you want. You can speak from anyone's perspective or in anyone's voice. Trying to sell something to moms with young babies? Tell a relatable mom story. Speak from a concerned husband's perspective. Talk like a caring empathetic girlfriend/fellow mommy. Possibilities are endless
• The first thing you say should grab everyone's attention. You can start with a rhetorical question, shocking statistics, a fun fact, a personal story, anything you want. The last thing you say should be a call to action. Make someone feel excited enough, uncomfortable enough, happy enough, or empowered enough to take action

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