If We Don’t Do It Someone Else Will
And they did and we didn’t
I talk a lot about the times I have failed and even failed to launch products in the past. This is another one of those stories. If you don’t want to read the whole thing — here it is : we sucked.
High School: Two other friends and I had another “brilliant” idea … we wanted to use credit card transactions as a means to raise money for charity. The concept was pretty simple, “round-up” the payments and donate that money to charitable causes. We wanted to connect “under-exposed” causes to donors across the GLOBE, and we would take a small percentage of each transaction.
Boom. Easy enough.
Hah. It never happened. We were complacent and did not build quickly enough. In fact, we made a bunch of progress over the first couple of days. We talked to potential customers and got advice from a mentor…but then nothing happened. We stopped…why?
This thing called LIFE got in the way.
We must have been really naive to think a couple of different things (that I know now):
- We would gain immediate utility from building this product. We, for some dumb reason or another, thought that we were going to grow quickly…Why the hell would we? It would take a boat load of work that we were frankly not prepared for.
- We were not ready to give up a lot to get a little. We were not prepared to make sacrifices.
These two lessons are super important and I have taken these to my successes. Just goes to show how you can learn a lot by screwing up. You just learn more when you actually do things right.
PS —someone else actually executed on the same idea! Go support them.
Woah. You read the whole thing! Thank you so much. I’d really appreciate if you shared this with a friend!
Let’s continue this conversation
twitter — @jrdngonen
email — jordangonen@wustl.edu
