Stoa Digest #111 : 🧑🏻‍🤝‍🧑🏼 Build your Town 🧑🏻‍🤝‍🧑🏼

Cast a stone across the waters sometime, see how many ripples you create.

I learned this when I just started building communities-

There is something very unpredictable about the dynamics of a community network: one message boomerangs back with a range of totally unexpected responses and a crazy number of new followers. 

This is the resourcefulness of a community, I believe.

~ Jahnavy, Team Stoa

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When I asked him for a one-liner introduction of himself, he gave me one word instead. Just like his Discord username suggests, he likes to call himself Maverick, an unorthodox or independent-minded person.

And yes, he does a lot of out-of-the-ordinary things.

Devain Bansal from Cohort 12 is an engineer turned UPSC attempter turned Crypto-startup geek. His knack for reading and breaking down complex ideas into simpler forms is what got him into the Crypto space. He wrote a blog around tech which got viral and led to Socket Tech (the company where he currently works) founders discovering him.

During his engineering college days, he didn’t find things to be “filling his brain” or “challenging enough” and hence he decided to pursue UPSC. Because of COVID, he had to put a halt on that, and he got a lot of time to explore other things like trading Forex and Cryptocurrencies and just like that, he got hooked.

He seemed to intuitively understand this tech and it piqued his interest. He got himself a mentor and started his research into space. Like most of the startups, he wasn’t just hired for research, he got involved in product marketing, building a community around it, and positioning the product in the market.

All things were new to him, but what kept him exploring and learning was how he viewed this new change. Instead of narrowing himself down to doing just one thing, he started observing people, broke out of the bubble of what he knew, and started compiling a list of 10-12 new things happening around and then started taking bets on them. Researched, spoke to people, developed a bit more interest in the topic, and got his hands dirty - if it didn’t sustain his curiosity, we would move on to the next item and hence he found a vast list of areas that really interests him and is now doubling down on them.

He likes calling himself the man of small experiments.

He never goes completely head-on into something. He either takes 3 months or a certain number of tasks and sees whether the new thing is exciting every day or not. If yes, he puts all his eggs there; if not, well, the experiment failed, get the next thing rolling.

This approach to work keeps it light yet driven for Devain and he enjoys sharing fun anecdotes around them.

With very strong takes on his love for work-from-home culture and his ability to explain the crypto space in the simplest way, talking to him will give one a lot of ideas to explore. Drop him a ping on Discord and plan your next small experiment with him.

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🐝 Community Buzz 🐝

Stoans from different cities are meeting and celebrating this long weekend together. From Amritsar to Delhi to Mumbai, #GoTeam!💪🏻

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⏯ For Stoans by Stoans ⏯

Here are some good books on marketing, for beginners-

• From an Indian Advertising PoV - Pandeymonium

• 22 Immutable Laws of Branding by Al Ries

• This is Marketing by Seth Godin

• The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell

• Alchemy by Rory Sutherland

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Hasta la vista, fam!