I continue to run my self-improvement experiments.

March experiment was about outreach.

The idea was to make sure that I am not creating boundaries around me and to expand the work I do into new industries and markets.

As part of the experiment, I set out to reach out to 21 potential partners in one month for forging business partnerships. At a bare minimum, I had to initiate a conversation with an intent to do business together.

This experiment wasn’t a success like the daily writing experiment (updated with March results) or show up experiment (updated with March results).

I have shared the results and my observations below for you to take a look.

Why These Experiments?

All of my growth has come from trying new things in life.

Ideas can be useful and motivate us, but without trying out these ideas we won’t know if they work. Even if ideas are time-tested without applying them in our lives we won’t see any improvements. That’s why these experiments.

Sharing the results forces me to take the experience seriously. And, by sharing my observations, I hope that you’ll able to try these ideas and experiments yourself.

This is the third experiment of 2019.

For now, I share the results of the experiments after completing them. In the future, I may announce public experiments and invite you to try a new experiment with me.

I am listing all experiments with results on this dedicated page.

I would also love to hear about your current or past experiments where you have tried implementing a new idea in your life.

The Results

I ended up doing 7. Way less than 21 planned.

If life was a classroom I would have barely passed with 33% marks.

Out of these one outreach was new and six were with brands I have partnered in the past.

5 remained at the first connect level and 2 moved to the next stage. One of these resulted in a pilot. If this is successful, the next step will be expansion in the US in partnership with this brand.

What I Learned and Observed

• Don’t consider reaching out for business if you don’t plan on following up.

• If you can help someone make money they’ll pay attention to what you say.

• Instead of throwing ideas on brands and people who represent them – first, ask if they are interested. This will make them invested in the process and increase the chances of reaching an outcome.

• If your prospects/potential partners are in different industries then it will be tough to engage multiple parties at once because you’ll need to expand your thinking and research in different directions.

• Don’t go against your nature. If laziness or procrastination is your nature then you need to go against it to be able to implement something like this.

• Not going cold with your contacts for years helps.

• Non-business discussions are best conversation starters but once that is established don’t wait too long to bring the topic of doing business together up.

• Find a middle ground for communication. You may like video more but another party may like email. Go with a mix of both.

• A calendar syncing tool like Calendly saves a ton of time when comparing to email back and forth for scheduling meetings.

• Ability to sense what a potential partner is looking for is a superpower. Some of that comes from experience which drives also intuition. But you can hack a part of it by scouring social media and brand websites to understand what is missing and where they are going.

I wished of doing more and didn’t meet my target but I am not too sad about what I did because it is not a classroom and I did better than zero which is what I was doing before this experiment 🙂

I am not sure if I’ll continue with it. If I do, I’ll update my results here.

Let me know if you have any questions.