Day 1 and 2 of collecting rejections

Something I'm really big on is getting out of my comfort zone. It's essential as an entrepreneur because working for yourself is just incredibly uncomfortable! Collecting rejections is based on the idea that the more rejections you aim for, the more successes you will actually get. I loved a blog article about the concept which came out a while ago - I can't find it just now but I'll try and find the author.

I went skiing with my family as a child and at the end of the holiday I proudly told my brother "I didn't fall once the whole week!". His reply:

"Well you obviously weren't pushing hard enough."

Typical older brother reply but also very true!

My brother was falling over because he was skiing much faster and taking bigger risks. He was totally right of course and was a much better skier because of it.

So my aim for the next month is to take a risk each day and collect rejections.

Day 1 - Launched Meet Your Heroes (1 rejection)

I figure it would be fun to interview some of my favourite founders. Covid has made me realise that there's lots of things I want to do before I die and I need to actively go out and do them.

So I asked a bunch of really successful entrepreneurs if I could interview them in September and October over Zoom. They all said yes!

Here's the list:

Scott Keyes - Founder of Scott's Cheap Flights
Daniel Vassallo - Twitter course creator extraordinaire
Anne-Laure Le Cunff - Founder of Ness Labs
Ben Tossell - Founder of Makerpad

Unlike most interview, I'm also going to be letting people that buy tickets ask questions as well so it's a lot more interactive and fun.

I'm still really excited about this but precisely ZERO people bought a ticket.

One rejection secured!

I've since reduced the price of tickets to $10 so hopefully that helps.

Day 2 - Asked for backlinks (No rejections yet)

I realise I need more backlinks to my website, No CS Degree where I interview developers without CS degrees. So I submitted the website to BetaList, a directory of startups.

I also asked Sabba Keynejad from Veed to give me a back-link. I interviewed one of his developers on my site recently and I suggested it would be a good way to show what working at Veed is like. I felt a bit weird asking someone straight out for a link but he kindly agreed so that's awesome.

After I tweeted about this Kirsty Devlin offered me a back link too! 😀 She works at Manchester Codes, a coding bootcamp in the north of England.

I asked Pat Walls for a link back as he had mentioned No CS Degree in an article about interview websites. Instead he offered me an interview on Starter Story which is awesome!