Hello! Thanks for giving me some of your attention. This post is a little meta, because it's all about how you get someone's attention.
Why do I want your attention? Because I just launched my observability startup, Telemetry Machine, and now I'm trying to do the seemingly impossible: getting noticed in the age of AI slop.
I want to talk about another place where you have to capture and hold attention despite tremendous competition: street performance (aka busking).
Recently, I found myself captivated by a busker. What captivated me wasn't his tricks. It was how he got people to notice and stay.
My kid and I were on our way to the Transport Museum in Covent Garden, which is famous for its street performances. I had never stopped for one, because I think of them as extremely touristy. We had already walked past a magician.
But then we heard yelling. I almost thought something violent was happening. My kid seemed curious, so I asked if he wanted to check it out. We walked inside to a busker's pitch, a performing spot with three benches that has apparently been there for decades. A small man in a funny hat, dressed almost like a leprechaun, was walking around and screaming at people. I didn't realize it yet, but that screaming was very purposeful: it had just brought us over.
We started to walk past, noncommittal. But then he looked me straight in the face and screamed, "STOP!" Of course I stopped on a dime. What was I going to do? Ignore him? (I would be a great victim for hypnosis.)
He was just getting started, with almost no one around him. This is the hardest part of the show: working up the initial audience.
About five minutes in, he had maybe ten people watching. He said something like: "Okay, I'm going to do a trick for you guys, but I want you to make lots of noise and clap, because people will hear you, think I'm really good and walk over. And if we get a big audience, I'll feed off your energy and give you a really amazing show." He walked us through how to clap and cheer, which itself made a huge amount of noise.
Then he did the trick. It wasn't anything major, but it was obviously not something we could have done. He did a handstand on a bench and rolled forward into a hat. But he did this with lots of showmanship and noise. We clapped and cheered.
He had basically enrolled us in building his audience. He could have simply said, "Hey, I'm about to do a trick, please clap." What he said instead was much more convincing. Why should we clap? Straight up, because if we clap, it will be loud and people will come over. And we did want the audience to be big, because if we're sitting there and nobody else is around, it's kind of boring.
Getting the first few people to make noise, I found out later, is a well-known tool of buskers.
Then he built up his "finale". I say "finale" in quotes because, really, it was his only significant trick. He talked about how dangerous it was and what would happen if he fell.
Before he did it, he gave us what I later learned is called the hat line, where he said this is my living, this is how I feed my family, please pay for it. He spoke about that for maybe five minutes. I wonder if there's psychology to this. Five minutes in, we hadn't left. So we were showing ourselves, and each other, that we'd pay.
Then came the finale: a handstand, really high up and precarious. Everybody clapped. We were impressed, I think partly because we had spent 30 minutes investing ourselves in it.
As soon as it was over, a couple of people walked away, but it felt like almost everyone, 30-40 people by now, got up to pay. The next performer was already waiting, geared up and miked.
Watching a master at their craft is particularly enjoyable. In this case, the craft wasn't acrobatics. It was crowd work: understanding how to capture and manage our attention.
It also humbled me in my own quest to find my first customers. Buskers start from nothing every single performance.
Now, I'm not going to talk about what I can learn about sales from this, because that would go way over my threshold for LinkedIn cringe. But what we're doing is not so different from busking. We're giving people something we think they want or need, and asking for money in return. The hard part is getting attention in the first place.
Right now, Telemetry Machine is at the almost-no-audience stage. We're working with our first few potential customers. (Early customers, I've learned, are absolute angels.)
Will we ever become masters at this, like that busker? Well hey, why don't you sign up to our blog and find out?