#5: The Second Question
Updates from last week and a Folklorist's secret weapon
👋🏽 Welcome to The Folklore, our weekly newsletter where we talk about our journey of building Folklory. Every week we’ll share updates, wins, and learnings, so sign up if you’d like to hear from us 🚀
In this week's edition of The Folklore, we’ll start off, as usual, with some updates from the last week and then talk about why follow-up questions are a key part of a Folklorist’s arsenal.
We’re also adding a new section - 🎙 Folklory of the week - where we share the kinds of Folklories people are requesting! Hopefully, this gives you a better idea about how people are using this service.
Let’s dive in!
Updates from 3rd - 9th April 2022
🏆 Wins
We got 1 new customer this week. That takes us to 6/100 on our #Mission100to100. The last 2 weeks have been slower, so we’re planning to work on some interesting content to get the word out to more people.
🤔 Learnings
When speaking to individuals and companies, we realized that the word “podcasts” is very limiting. When people see the word “podcast”, they think this is only for die-hard podcast fans, which most people aren’t. They think podcasts are long, niche and outright boring. Everyone seems to know a podcast addict but if they aren’t one, the idea of Folklory loses its sheen. We saw the same when we were positioning Folklory as an “audio gift”. To us, Folklories are so much more than podcasts. Yes, we do leverage audio as the medium but we’d like to see Folklories being compared more to physical photo albums and less to podcasts.
🎙Folklory of the week
When a customer buys a Folklory, we ask them “What is this Folklory going to be about?”. This week we had a customer who wanted us to speak with them and their sisters. Here’s what they had to say -
“We are very different people and we generally don’t understand each other. Even if some of us think we do lol”
This is just one of the many examples of the kinds of Folklories where you can capture interesting conversations and preserve them forever.
It’s all about the follow-up
A key ingredient to a great conversation is the the follow up question. Not only does it allow you to go one level deeper, it also tells the speaker that you were paying close attention to what they were saying and have a genuine curiosity to learn more. In our opinion, it’s a sign of respect toward the speaker. Displaying this respect makes it easier for speakers to let their guard down and go deeper into a topic. We try our best to follow this in all our recordings and the kinds of conversations this leads to are truly magical. You can read more about our Folklorist’s reflections through their conversations.
While this might seem obvious, most of us don’t do this when having conversations. We are very quick to respond and more often than not, we’re listening but with the sole intent of replying. In fact, even before the other person has completed what they had to say, we’re already thinking about our response. This results in people feeling attacked and keeping their guard up at all times.
So next time you’re having a conversation, try and listen only to ask another question, and not to respond. You’ll be surprised by the outcome.
Hope you’ve enjoyed this week’s episode of The Folklore. If you like what we’re doing and want to help, we’d really appreciate it if you could share this with one other person, who you think might like the idea.
If you have feedback, ideas, or just want to get in touch, you can always write to us at theteam@folklory.com. We would love to hear from you ❤️
Until next time
Haresh