Hi, I'm a deaf wannabe entrepreneur like you. I use hearing aids. I cannot communicate well i.e. it is impossible for me to assert myself in groups or even in n

Hi, I'm a deaf wannabe entrepreneur like you. I use hearing aids. I cannot communicate well i.e. it is impossible for me to assert myself in groups or even in noisy environments like crowded restaurants with individuals or small groups of 2-3. I don't know ASL. I struggle with accents too as I was born and raised in Delhi and moved to USA just one and a half years back for graduate school. I cannot use a phone (use Relay which can be extremely frustrating for the non-deaf person on the other side of the line). I've come to the conclusion that I need a cofounder to pitch my ideas/MVP. It is a bit painful because I love presenting, I've been told I'm a natural. I have no problems pitching my idea, I can speak articulately. The problem comes whenever someone from the audience has a question. I can't hear the question. The workaround is to have them IM the question to me from their laptops but that can be as frustrating as Relay as the conversation isn't really very freeflowing. I also hate groups. I hate socials and parties where I barely know the people there, I'm mostly standing in a group unable to follow the conversation and they end up being really boring. As you can imagine, meetups where I do not know _anybody_ are much worse. But the bottom line is, you need to adopt a different strategy. You need to build up contacts and use email/IM to pitch your idea instead of pitching on the spot. Collect visiting cards/emails. Also remember being deaf, you have a big social network that you can tap in. I developed a MVP for delivering public announcements to phones in textual form (developed a webapp, Android app etc) and through the HLAA (Hearing Loss Association of Florida) I managed to get a meeting with executives from Continental Airlines. At the meeting, my professor at graduate school did the pitching and his pitch was incredible, I just couldn't have done it as well as he. About 80% of my communication with the professor was via email, I met with him face-to-face about just 8-10 times in the 7 month period the project was running (when I had to demo something). All the ideas and progress reports we did it through email. So it all comes down to finding the right cofounder (my professor would check his email every 15 minutes and preferred email to phone and face-to-face meetings with everyone).