What is your biggest learning experience from failure?
Aaron O'Leary
36 replies
Failure presents great opportunities to learn and some might stick with you. Mine would likely be community first, failing to prioritise community building and nurturing caused my first project to dwindle
Replies
ronsheridan@ronsheridan
Anyone can do it. And most do.
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TimeToCoda
Build products that you yourself need and would use.
Build in a domain that you are familiar with and have particular expertise in.
The fringes and overlaps of your area of expertise and some other domain are where the opportunities are.
Voicenotes
Aaron, how would you bootstrap community activity if you were starting today? Any tool recs? Even a high level answer would be helpful!
Failure has taught me to be open to new ideas in order to succeed
AnythingLLM
For me, I had created a tech service that allowed multiple people at the same time to own a domain, but when it was visited you would be redirected to another site depending on who was leading that geographic area.
For example you could own example.com in some region and i could in another. Anyone visiting that site in your area would see your site and in my area, the site I set. We could then both advertise with this premium domain for pennies of what it costs IRL.
Cool tech, but no one wants to do that. I bit of market research wouldve probably shown me that. Dosent help my launch was during covid where ad dollars evaporated in terms to keep businesses doors open. So in a word - market research and validation before building.
Trackabi
My main experience was that the value of failing is overestimated and succeeding is a much more valuable experience.
Never give up, Nothing is impossible 👍️
Startups are hard and ensuring that one is clear on some of the following aspects is important so the chances of failure can be brought down dramatically. That’s why here are the Startup questions for you to ask before beginning.
Founders Vs Investors
Understand the difference between them. No part-time co-founding.
Founders are a part of the journey, investors have a stake in the journey.
Similar financial and intellectual sync, you will not succeed if your motivations are not the same.
Hypothesis Vs Validation
Get your hypothesis behind startup plan clear. Why are you doing it? Keep updating and regularly check on these notes, imperative to get your shop running.
Validation is a series of experiments backing your initial hypothesis. A strong homework and quick answer here is necessary to make either the right pivots or to do course corrections.
Culture Vs Strategy
Culture eats strategy for breakfast.
Marry strategy with execution, have fewer risk points and diligently work to de-risk as many components of the company as possible.
KISS: Keep it simple stupid, if you can’t articulate in simple terms, you are missing something.
Execution Vs Operations
Have KPIs defined for every task? You don’t improve what you don’t measure.
Some things take time, don’t try and rush off. Understand the gestation period for the foundational task and don’t scale prematurely.
It’s going to be difficult and throw new challenges not anticipated. In the end, execution is all that matters.
Hiring Vs Firing
Single-handedly the biggest factor in the early stages.
Get it wrong and nothing else would matter.
Hire for attitude first. Fire if no aptitude.
Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton. Hope these startup questions are helpful for you in your beginning phase.
my biggest learning experience from failure was to embrace it. Far to many of us run away from failure and or not see the true lesson it is teaching us. If we can truly embrace failure then we can truly embrace success
For me it was that the founders where too similar. Both business people but the product was a tech product. Furthermore we our skills where nearly the same what made it difficult to get synergy effects of different skills. Since them I am only working on projects where my founding team is diverse and everyone has different skills in their expertise :)
Asking Franklin
Sure @aaronoleary, community for me too is the key to growth without ads but with recognition by people ! For me is to dev a full Saas without asking lead about new feature's interest. Wasting time for the most 😱
Never give up
Firstly, I would like to throw some light on what I think is the meaning of 'failure'. Failure happens when you make a mistake and you don't learn and extract anything out of it. You choose not to look back, not to analyze and not to rearrange.
In that sense, I have always learned from my mistakes. Hence I'll tell you what my biggest mistake was.
Well, it has to be when I decided not to focus on one niche and try to cover 4-5 of them at the same time for the purpose of penetrating more market verticals.
It becomes really hectic and infeasible for the algorithm, users and your team to understand how to optimize and what to prioritize.
Hence, from what I could encapsulate, it's really really important to focus on the depth of your startup or your content. Take one niche and leverage as much as you can. Something great will happen.
That's my experience!!
1 . Failures are not your enemies, they happen in life. Several people have known failures. In fact they create in your life an opportunity to correct yourself, to regroup yourself, to believe in yourself and to accept the challenge that is in front of you, on your path towards a successful life.
2 . Failures are the best teachers in your life. Everytime you fail, you learn a lesson. A lesson as to where did you go wrong. What you have to do to improve yourself? You learn to correct all errors caused by you.
3 . Failures have a psychological effect in your life. You are sad to have failed but you should be happy that you are still alive to have been offered the opportunity to realise and correct everything that went wrong.
4 . Whilst you fail in life your family may be temporarily be affected by that but it is your family itself will help you to find the best solution to erase the blunder you have committed. At the end of the day it strengthens family ties.
5 . Failures act as a catalyst in life of some people. It just make people react, react towards the positive side of life. Once you have failed , you would become very careful the next time. In fact you will double your vigilance.
6 . Failures make you realise what you have done, what you have lost, what could have been done, what could have been saved.
7 . There is also some fact that failures destroy houses. Your failure to have a successful married life and to have an extra marital affair is the reason for the destruction of your happy married life. Of your happy family.
8 . Some failures make you lose your job. You made your boss lose millions of dollars just by doing a silly mistake. You don't have the right to be pardoned. So you get fired.
9 . Failures are the hard truth of life. You agree or not they come and they will still be coming throughout your life. You have just to be careful. Don't judge too fast,don't do any job without analysing the positive and the negative effects.
10. If there is room for you not to fail then so be it. Have a happy life. To fail means to rise again for the best.
this is very good and intersting for this is it
Yeah, I agree with your opinion
Try harder and give your best.
InAppStory
Was afraid to be noisy, extraordinary ----> didn't try anything crazy enough
Now – I'm trying to do the first step in 48 hours
Becoming even more creative, resilient and motivated.