This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
I believe we can learn as much from failure as we can from success, if not in fact, much more. It's with this principle in mind that I offer you a weekly segment called Failure Friday. Failure Friday is a collection of short stories about mistakes, missteps, disasters, and of course, failure, all those things that go wrong, all those difficulties that come our way. What do we learn from them, but also just how does it feel to kind of go through them? And ultimately, I think what we often discover is that it produces a sense of empowerment, a sense of like, wow, that was tough, that was rough, but you know, somehow I am able to get through it.
And often what's waiting on the other side is something much better or at least unexpected or different. So I hope that through these stories, you find some encouragement. Today's short story features Anushka Aran from Toronto, Canada. She is the founder of a project management tool called iGol. iGol competes with much bigger apps and tools you might have heard of.
And she believes hers is better, at least for people in the early stages of a startup or business. Now, as you'll hear, Anushka got the chance to pitch to a major investor much sooner than she expected, but it turned out a little bit more time might've been helpful since she ran into some problems during the pitch. So let's hear the story from her. I'll be back at the end with a quick wrap up. [Music]
- Hi there, I'm Anushka Aran.
I am the founder of iGol.io. iGol is a centralized work platform for startup founders who are currently scaling up their team. And at that stage, founders really need to focus on being a facilitator who knocks down obstacles for their team members. So what we're trying to do is kind of centralize all these different work tools that a team would use, such as appointment scheduling, meeting management, toss delegation, and aligning those teams on a particular common goal. So I was doing this pitch in Vancouver in Canada, the pitch that you just heard, and I was at a Toastmaster club in Vancouver.
So you probably heard of Toastmasters. It's these clubs that help people practice and refine their speaking skills. And I was at the LETC, which is Vancouver Entrepreneurial Toastmasters Club. When I pitched this, my only idea was to refine my pitch for potential investors and for potential clients. I was not looking for an actual investor at that time, because I did not know if iGol was ready yet for an investor to provide funding.
This was about six months ago and we had just launched our MUE. What I did not know was hiding in between the audience was one of the top investors in the BC area and in the British Columbia area in Canada, and someone who had been a president of the ETC for the longest time. This guy was an experienced investor, top of the line, and he heard my pitch, and afterwards he came to me. I thought it's gonna be a feedback on how to refine the pitch, but he told me, hey, I'm interested in your product, give me a call, I would like to invest in IGol. Well, I was excited and I was certainly very nervous.
I took on the challenge and I thought, okay, let's give him a call and get something set up. The next day I got on a call with him and in the meeting, I had my pitch deck ready with all the milestones, expectations, and the things that you need to pitch to an investor. So I pull up IGol.io and I log in and we're in the middle of the product demo, everything's going fine. And the key feature, which is a meeting management platform that centralizes note-taking actions and everything else, I opened that up and it crashes. Not only do I see a bug, but now the platform was populated with someone else's data.
And what ended up happening is as he's watching my screen, I'm like, just give me a moment. It would just take a moment, it's loading, and it wouldn't stop crashing one bug after another, or in symbols that require serious debugging. And he's there blank face watching me as I tell him the benefits of the features that wouldn't even load. And besides that, it's giving us tons of errors. So he's like, all right, all right.
I think I've seen enough. So there I was now clicking on the stop sharing button. And he told me that not only is the product still very interesting to him, he liked my attitude of still explaining to him how it would be beneficial to a potential customer. At that point, he said that it's difficult to invest in the product just because it's still in its early stages, which is quite understandable. But what I did not realize is that I ended up gaining his confidence in the product through my pitch.
I was able to tell him the benefits of the features, and it got him so excited that he ended up being my first paying customer. And not only did he buy an annual subscription worth of about $300, he also signed up 40 of his team members for iGoam. The most important lesson I learned out of all of this is to keep going and not freaking out. So I took on the challenge and actually did what needed to be done at that point. I mean, I don't think I could have ever planned for it, or I could have ever written on paper my script or anything, but studying the audience that was in front of me, so trying to understand where he's coming from.
And at the same time, making sure that I don't freak out, keeping my calm, keeping my cool, and having that trust in my own product. I would say the topmost thing I've learned is having confidence and making sure that when things go wrong, you can still stand up and deliver. So that's iGo.io story. I hope you check it out. Thank you so much for listening to me.
[Music]
Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat. Hope you enjoyed that story. I could just imagine giving a presentation and having everything crash, not work as it should, and not just the presentation software, but obviously the product that you're trying to show off, but well done to Iniska for persevering, and also just for sharing this transparent and truthful story. Like I said, this is how we learn. Check out the website, iGo.io.
Like you heard about, it's a project management tool, especially for people who are getting started or for new startups, iGoal.io, iGoal.io. There's a free version you can use for as long as you want and then upgrade for more features. If you've got a question or an update for us about your side hustle, there's no charge for that. sidehustleschool.com/questions. Come and say hello, let me know what you're working on, what you're up to, how we can be of service, and I hope you will subscribe or follow and come back tomorrow.
My name is Chris Guillebeau. You've been listening to Side Hustle School. [Music]
From the Onward Project.
