The Rejection Challenge

I'm writing a book and I've been very nervous about sharing it with people because I am very sensitive of people's time. I've been asking people to read the premise

Being a Professor is hard! Technology is rapidly changing and I'm constantly on the search for guest lecturers working on the latest and greatest around emerging technologies. Next semester, I'm teaching Systems Design and Design Research. One of the projects in my Systems Design class is related to finding ways to innovate around cancer inspired by my nephew's cancer battle.

I am building a fintech startup. Reached out to potential cofounders, advisors, infrastructure partners that are critical for the project, and customers for my business.

Reach out on LinkedIn to lookalikes of my target customer (the Kinn), so membership club, coworking spaces etc.

I'm building an ML piano performance evaluation system for music education, not just "did you hit the right notes," but actual musical assessment: tone quality, phrasing, dynamics, interpretation, musicality. The kind of feedback conservatory teachers give, but scalable to 225M+ musicians worldwide. My outreach goal: Get feasibility validation and technical advice from audio ML researchers whose work I'm building on, specifically the MERT authors (the music-specific transformer I'm using) and other experts in music information retrieval, multi-modal learning, and audio ML. I'm a Berklee classical pianist who pivoted to ML engineering, and I needed to know if my architecture is feasible with limited expert labels (~300), or if I'm being naively optimistic. The stakes: I've spent 2+ weeks designing this system, translating conservatory evaluation rubrics into ML objectives. If experts say "this won't work," I need to know before investing in expensive data annotation.

Tried to get people to join the waitlist

Connecting with product & growth marketers for 15-min coffee chats to learn, listen, and grow.

Funding for a nonprofit, Funding for AI tool, and company tours.

I tried exploring the buried desires within me such as joining a VC, raising and even joining high potential startups i believed in

Our startup builds AI computer vision solutions for restaurants — helping them improve operations and reduce losses using their existing cameras. We currently have 7 paying clients, $70K ARR, and are raising a $1M pre-seed round. So far, we’ve closed or secured $400K and are continuing the raise. For this outreach challenge, I focused on reaching angel investors with experience or strong interest in the restaurant industry — people who could not only invest but also bring domain expertise. I identified them on LinkedIn by filtering for investors who had founded, managed, or invested in restaurant-related ventures.

Vegetarian Vows & High-Stakes Outreach https://drive.google.com/file/d/1RUfn9k5FdUloTPblZISqXrIRVi5E3_zL/view?usp=sharing

Agentic landing page builder for non technical entrepreneurs that want to sell online

Focused on sparking a creator-driven trend where influencers let their audience choose between different hairstyle looks. Rather than leading with an app pitch, the aim was to offer a genuinely fun content idea creators would want to make on their own — sharing multiple hairstyle options and letting their community decide which one feels most “them.” Reached out to a carefully selected group of creators with personalized messages tailored to their tone and posting style. The goal was to introduce the concept in a way that fit seamlessly into their existing content, planting a small idea that could naturally grow into a broader, community-led challenge.

VERY direct outreach via email to SUPER big shots

I am reaching out to Goldie because I want honest feedback from people who understand visibility and creative work. Her perspective can help me make sure Collega is positioned the right way for creators and that I am actually building something valuable for them.

n/a

I came up with a product idea on the spot and pitched it to my fellow attendees in person. I'm an engineer at heart and sitting behind a terminal is comfort zone for me. For me to be a great entrepreneur, I need to get comfortable pitching and with rejection. What I did today: Came up with an idea, pitched it to my fellow attendees and used that feedback to refine it. Go from level 0 to Level 2 depth and detail of the idea with real world feedback Outcome expectations: Get brutal feedback on why this product makes or does not make sense and get into the habit of pitching + listening to my users (without getting defensive !!) The actual Idea Pitch: Shopping for mobiles, smartwatches, laptops and even car requires a huge amount of research. Cause these products have atleast 50 different features and you actually don't care about all 50. What if you give me your preferences and I produce a simple to understand video or a reel with the exact information you were looking for !

I tried to accomplish in person rejections. I printed out multiple copies of my resume and went to various companies looking to hand deliver my resume to put a face to a name.

(Please keep all content confidential) Had some connectivity issues! I was trying to reach out to potential venue hosts who could accommodate a space for a cause that is commonly negatively stereotyped subject.