Selling Ice To an Eskimo

Let us assume that the two of us are wannabe entrepreneurs and have invented a revolutionary ‘ice-making machine’. What’s revolutionary about it? Well, we still don’t know, but we have some fancy ‘concepts and ideas’. Above all, we desperately want to be entrepreneurs!

So, we get this once in a lifetime meeting with Vinod Khosla – the greatest VC in the Universe. How we got this meeting is a secret and cannot be revealed in public. Actually it can’t be revealed at all, because that (How to Get a meeting with Vinod Khosla) will be our next startup business anyway!

Vinod is very kind and patient; he gives us exactly half an elevator ride to pitch our idea to him. When have ridden to the 34th floor (he is going to the 68th floor), he smiles and tells us, “Guys, I like your passion. Go and sell your ice-making contraption to some real Eskimo – show me pictures plus their intent; and then maybe I can then give you a few hundred million dollars in angel funding….”

So Hum!! That's the mission. You and I have to sell an Ice-Making Machine to some real Eskimos.

After weeks of begging and borrowing some money, we board a plane to Alaska on this mission!

Any successful entrepreneur will tell you that the toughest part of any startup is Sales. And boy, if you are selling something that has never been invented before, or been consumed by someone before, then selling that ‘thing’ is nearly impossible. Therefore, the mission of this exercise is to sell and figure out how to make the impossible possible!

Before reaching, I have done lots of homework for us. The first lesson in sales is to do thorough research about your customer, market, competitors and social sensitivities. I can tell you that selling an ice-making machine to Eskimos ain’t gonna be easy…


After reaching our cold Igloo hotel, a rush of nostalgia hits me. Many years back, when I had started an online contesting portal called contests2win.com, I had undertaken a very similar journey. I had flown to Bangalore, checked into a shady 2 star hotel and then using the Bangalore Telephone directory (no Google, ask me or LinkedIn around then) started calling random clients. Selling online contests in 1998 to Indian brand owners was akin to selling ice to Eskimos.