This is the actual outline I used to pitch This Keyboard Feeds People, my custom for-charity keyboard creation service, to my (somewhat captive audience) of young white-collar AT&T employees.
When I joined TDP, I became the highest earning member of my family. That comes with a whole slew of weird feelings:
- Excitement - “I can finally buy myself a pair of $70 shoes”
- Imposter Syndrome - “I don’t deserve to be here”
- Eventually, feeling lost - “what do I do now?”
And when you don’t know, people will start telling you what to do with your money.
- My sister told me to live in a luxury apartment
- my dad told me to buy a house
- My mom told me not to listen to my dad
- My friends told me to switch companies to get more money, my coworkers told me to buy cryptocurrency, and Instagram ads told me to buy everything under the Sun.
And I…couldn’t even tell what I wanted.
When I’d get a bonus or a promotion, my first thought was “what is this all for?”
[insert picture of keyboard here]
This keyboard exists so I can ask a better question: What if every time I wrote a message on Teams or a line of code, it was a reminder that I can help someone who really needs it?
Now, nobody has to pay $150 for a keyboard — in fact, at AT&T, you don’t need to pay anything. The company-provided Logitech keyboards get the job done just fine.
But I’d like to invite you to join me in making a keyboard that’s YOURS, that lives on your desk and reminds you that you have the power to change somebody’s life.
I’ll design and assemble a custom keyboard for you with 0% markup. Instead I’ll ask you to donate to Elijah’s Promise, a food bank in New Brunswick.
I hope that if anything that I said resonated with you, you’ll join me and buy a keyboard that feeds people, too.
I wanted to emphasize two things that Seth Godin says determines the price of an offering:
Story - I wanted someone to feel the reason for why they’d interact with me. It’s not because I make the highest-quality keyboards (because I don’t). It’s because somewhere in the autonomous loop of commuting, working, and sleeping, I wanted to give them a sense that they were contributing to something greater than themselves.
Substitutes - There is no convincing someone uninterested in paying for a product to give me money. The work-provided keyboards are free, and I want to loudly pass up on any conversations that revolve around a comparison between my offering and theirs.
After the speech, I stood at a table with my keyboard offerings.
And after what felt like an eternity of waiting, fidgeting as people avoided eye contact with me or had conversations with their backs turned to me…
…I finally got my first customer.