Sharing the Bad Stuff
After crushing the free continental breakfast and three cups of what passes for coffee, you make your way to the part of the venue where the session you’ve been waiting for is about to start. The speaker’s company is known for exponential growth, they’ve solved some really hard scaling problems.
You’re stoked.
Thirty minutes later you’re deflated and anxious. As the speaker moved rapid-fire through one mind-blowing metric after another, the narrative accompanying each slide superficial and self-congratulatory, you started wondering if you were in the wrong place. Was this a technical talk or a recruiting pitch?
Sound familiar?
In a world where companies are competing for talent and mindshare, these one-dimensional odes to engineering prowess make sense.
Look at what we did, we’re awesome!
However, when you expect to benefit from the hard-won wisdom of someone who has been there and done that, it’s frustrating or even demoralizing when all you get is rah-rah.
In my case, prolonged exposure to the glories of others while surrounded by what I felt were fires burning out of control resulted in a profound loss of perspective. I felt like the only one with problems, as if my life were some kind of hellish Mad Lib:
Who needs an alarm clock? _________ will wake me up!
- An angry customer
- A frustrated account exec
- PagerDuty
- Indigestion
After talking about this with other entrepreneurs, it quickly became clear that nearly everyone goes through what feels like an interminable series of firedrills, blindsides, faceplants, and setbacks before succeeding — whether that’s building a feature, a team, or a business.
It’s said that in order to avoid or deal effectively with failure, you have to experience failure. I think it’s possible to gain some of that experience through others, learning to avoid the pitfalls they didn’t.
We really should be sharing more of the bad stuff, candidly and often.
So, when we had the opportunity to speak at Launch Scale we chose to talk in detail about everything we screwed up when building one of the major components of our platform.
As we developed the talk, we thought the story would be a contrast in DIY versus hosted solutions. What emerged was a story about how lack of clarity in the team’s mission & vision contributed to a lot of wasted time & effort.
It was a lot of fun to put this talk together, and even more fun to present. We hope you enjoy it and walk away with some useful tips.
CEO Paul Midgen @ Launch Scale: https://vimeo.com/113565831
