As an entrepreneur, you will inevitably encounter failure; it is overcoming it that is the biggest challenge. Our partner, the FailCon Conference, has put together a nice series of short interviews with entrepreneurs about failure - including how they overcame it, and the lessons they learned as a result. Below are some of our favorite quotes from the interviews.
The FailCon Conference is coming up on Monday, October 24th in San Francisco. FailCon is a one-day conference for tech entrepreneurs, investors, developers and designers to study their failures and prepare for success. Founder Institute readers get 20% off here. FI Grads and Mentors get an even bigger discount - check out the private section below.
"Get product in the hands of end users as early as possible. We waited 3 months with that first product, when I could have had high fidelity mocks in front of potential customers that first week"
- Ethan Bloch, CEO of Flowtown, describing the lesson he learned after misunderstanding his end user and throwing away 3-5 months of development. Read the interview here.
"[Our biggest mistake was] not giving our employees enough independence. Being entrepreneurs we've definitely got an urge to just do things ourselves when we see something that needs to be done. Unfortunately, that process doesn't scale, and eventually you have to rely on other people"
- Justin Kan, Founder of Justin.tv. Read the interview here.
"You need to remember to do a rewrite of your product... if you organically evolve a codebase as you violently change business models, you’re going to have a lot of cruft that will be very difficult to maintain and won’t be architected for the right uses"
- David Weekly, Co-Founder of PBworks, on the challenges he faced pivoting PBworks from B2C to a B2B. Read the interview here.
"Be confident in the great product you’ve built and offer users the most simple model in deciding on how to use your service. If you focus on product and delighting your customers, they will in turn feel satisfied by paying for your service"
- Julia Hartz, Co-Founder & President of EventBrite, on the company's initial mistake to employ a freemium model. Read the interview here.
"My mindset has definitely changed. I no longer automatically assume I have the next big hit with a particular idea or implementation. Instead, now I believe that with some luck, I will be able to find a hit with enough testing and experimenting"
- Elisabeth Yin, Co-Founder & CEO of Launchbit, on what she learned by spending $20,000 on her last company to develop a product nobody wanted. Read the interview here.
"When you’re trying to learn from failure, you have to be fully open to what the lesson might be. If you have something out there and learn that it is not working, take it out or change it, don’t just add to it. Being as open to editing down as you are to creating more is very hard to do, but very rewarding"
- John Devanney, Principal of Moment, Expert on UI Design. Read the interview here.
"Trying to grow too quickly or focusing on 'shallow growth' can be killer... Of course you need to get momentum, but it's kind of like those schemes that offer you 10,000 Twitter followers... it's like, if those 10K Twitter followers are all bots, does that help you succeed? Probably not! So, I think building what Umair Haque calls "thick value" is important because it requires you to connect with your customer base"
- Chris Messina, Open Source Advocate. Read the interview here.
"You're making a million decisions on the way to launching your business, and it's important to recognize that many of these decisions aren't based on facts; you're making hypotheses about how the future might play out. Identify your top three hypotheses that are vital to making the business work and create a plan to validate them"
- Victor Lombardi, Product Developer and Author. Read the full interview here.
