A Vietnamese backpack entrepreneur pivoted to mask manufacturing using his existing fabric supply chain when COVID hit, while a CRM software company retooled into an employee-engagement platform for remote workers. Both succeeded by solving urgent problems customers faced rather than selling what they'd planned to offer.
Right now, I have a gentleman who had a successful Kickstarter campaign on— with backpacks. He had a really special type of backpack. And he's in Hanoi. Hanoi is a capital for fabric. That's what they do there. It's not like Shenzhen in China, which has a lot of components, electronic components. There's a lot of fabric coming out of Vietnam. He's there at the moment. And he called me on WhatsApp the other day, middle of the night. And said, hey, can you airlift cartons? 'Cause he's making face masks and going to sell them because that's what people need today. He's responding to the market, right? So he's got a store on Amazon and he's gonna be selling face masks. I'm gonna be bringing them by the container load, by the pallet load, maybe airlifting them. We haven't got to that stage yet, but that's how people are moving. They're responding to the market, right? He knows nothing about face masks. He's a military, ex-US vet, ex-military guy who liked to bicycle and had these really cool backpacks for bicyclists, as an example. This is how someone's responding. So how are you responding? Think about that. This is an enterprise software company that has, like you have, hey Siri for the phone, they've got a conversational tool where you can talk to enterprise data. Much better than ThoughtSpot and Tableau and people like that because they're going straight to the data. They had a tool, the solution they were selling for the CRM space for Salesforce data, and guess what? That market's not there today. So we designed an employee engagement tool and actually got a letter of intent yesterday. Yeah, yesterday I got verbal for that. We did the presentation last week. We made the pivot, made the switch, and they said, yeah, We actually need to take care of our employees at home. We want to know what's going on. How can you help us do that? Let's put that together. And they signed the NDA and the LOI, right? So again, enter— it's across the board, solve problems that people have today. That's the pivot we went because no one was interested. They weren't interested in the, in the CRM solution, but taking care of employees, that struck a note. They had budget. They are concerned about that. Solve problems your customers want to solve. Stop selling stuff that you want to sell. In fact, I say stop selling, start supplying solutions, right? 5Ss.
