By the time monsoon in Delhi was subsidizing in 2017, we were gaining traction. A famous publishing house in Delhi realized the potential of what we were doing and started copying everything about our meetups, line by line.
Remember the Delhi session of August 13 2017 I mentioned in this post? One of their representatives joined us here as an audience. Before we knew it, the market had copied everything about what we curated!
Too bad they forgot that they could only copy what we create and not 'how' we do! *wink*
This is sixth lesson from a post I wrote about my learnings from building Stories Worth Sharing. If you have not checked , I recommend you visit it once for the context 7 Things Stories Worth Sharing taught me!
The sixth lesson in this list?
There is no time to envy!
While the people at publishing house were busy copying us, my mind was thinking about things that I could leverage from their resources and reach. The 'leading' publishing house that attempted to copy had massive FB reach.
One fine evening, I was walking on my balcony post dinner when a post from them sprang up in the feed on Facebook. I do not remember the text verbum dictum. In summarizing, it asked young people from India to comment on their names to take the initiative to respective cities.
EXACTLY WHAT WE WERE DOING THEN! (~9 cities added by then!)
"Huh! Another imitation?" I murmured to myself. But wait! This is dot what I can leverage from their reach. I figured I should be moving fast. Without taking my team in confidence, I drafted a text to send to sensible people I found in those comments. This text asked them to join SWS and take it to their city!
Result? The 'employees' of the publishing house were off duty to return to their manager's mandate of expanding the next day. Before they returned to work the next day, the serious candidates from that post were already in 2/3 stage of conversation with Stories Worth Sharing. When these people were approached by the ‘employees’ a few days later, they were already in process of hosting their first meetup in their city.
Such was the impact of moving fast that we doubled the number of our cities in just 3 days. This also opened space to host more people in more cities who can take it to more states.
If you are a student of non medical, organic chemistry chain reaction must hit you! Did it? :P
2-3 of these people I met via this channel went on to head their respective state. It was fun to enable a 20 year old boy who was heading state of MP before he was out of college. (11 cities, beat that!)
What really happened here? I was merely 21 and furious the first time I learnt about how our concept was copied. I am not certain how or when the sense prevailed in me to think of leveraging their assets for my purpose.
Funny note: remember Merlin? The one I mentioned in #30 Value, the real success? For a very long time, she thought I was representative of the same publishing house. It was only after we met for the first time in Itanagar that I shared the story and had a hearty laugh about it!
Eventually, since the publishing house did not initiate the concept, they were not too innovative in their approach and lacked ‘skin in the game’. They shut down this segment completely after trying to conduct a couple of more sessions in New Delhi but nothing major beyond.
The point I am trying to make here is that envy is a human emotion created to eat you up like a termite.
If someone is doing better than you, recognize their effort that goes into their craft away from public eye.
If they are copying you, they are already consuming the stale food while you are busy cooking fresh in the kitchen. See what spices you can take from their dish, add it to yours and relish on the taste of the new dish. A dish best served cold! (IFYKWIM)
Next week, I will tell you final story about lesson number 7:
Value your people!
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