Learning's from Fishing !!!

Have you ever gone fishing? What is the first thing that comes to your mind? A calm serene place as if nature itself painted its best work on a canvas or the $167.3 billion industry (2021 Statista) with ships cluttered along the bay with loud noises and seagulls everywhere? Irrespective of the nature of fishing or the view, there is one similarity in both.

Hooks & Baits !

You need a hook and a bait to catch the fish. Its pretty obvious right. Then, why am I taking about fishing and hooks. I never been fishing, except the shows on Discovery which I binge watched every morning in my summer vacations before my +2.

Recently I realized (I knew the importance but, when you experience it, it is quite a different feeling) the importance of Hooks in selling or building a product or service. The mechanism used to make a hook or its working is quite similar to the mechanism of building or selling a product or a service.

Lets take a few seconds here!

The only use of a hook is to catch the fish and bait to attract it. If you do not have a hook or if it is not suitable for the type of fish you want to catch or the bait is not attractive (as you already have 1000 more fisherman ) you will either never catch a fish or you will catch less. It becomes more important when fishing is your livelihood.

Now let's use the same formula to sales and business development. If the product/service (Hook) is not designed properly , without proper market research, competitor analysis it will meet the same fate as the fisherman above. No sales.

Hooks are more important for Startups, with big players and 100 competitors, if your offering is mundane it will fail. Sales team cannot sell the product or service because, engaging a client needs something unique to hook him to at least listen to them. It does not matter even if the company has 100 products, when those hundred are sold by 1000 others too.

This seems very basic and simple, but trust me, most of the startup think they are unique, but does not have a strong Hook. Everything looks good until the sales number <=1.

Coming to the bait (Marketing, Product design, UI and UX etc), Even if you have a strong hook, if the way the product or service offered is not as per the current trend it will make selling quite difficult. With ready made technology in boom, the competition gets even tough. Placing the right bait, at right place to a right fish is the deciding factor.

But How?

Patience, yes! what I learnt from my observation and a bit of experience is that, if I want to start a company I will spend the maximum amount of time doing Market research, Surveys and collect data and repeat it thrice. Get feedback and spend time on the ground, do pilot study as many times as possible to finally create a design for my product or service. Will make less assumptions and more fact checks. Because finding my perfect hook and the best bait is the hardest part. So being patient and not getting into the madness of starting up asap will decide the longevity of a startup or a product/service.

Disclaimer: Images are from Pixabay and views are from personal observation and experience. This is my first article, would like to get a constructive feedback.