Freedom to Fail
Make Decisions, Take Risks, and Own the Learnings
I’ve been taking lots of risks lately with my side project, Closet Minimal. Talking about it on social media, putting my personal credibility on the line, trying to find my voice as a co-founder. It makes me nervous, and that’s okay.
I’m nervous because I want to do it right. Sweating the details even when no one is listening. Because I want to be practicing good habits before we need to have good habits, so we don’t stumble over beginner mistakes when the stakes are higher.
Knowing You’re Going to Fail — And Doing it Anyways
Knowing you’re going to fail and doing it anyways takes some faith. It’s like learning to ride a bike. You can see people doing it, you know the theory about how you are supposed to do it, and you’re going to wobble and fall anyways when you try for the first few times.
Here’s the thing, you know you’re going to fail, but you don’t know how you’re going to fail. That’s where the learning happens. And your failure is going to be different from the person before you. Your failure is going to help you get better because it will expose the area where you need to grow at this time. You can do the same thing at different times and fail differently, because the context will shift, and you will learn something new every time.
Shining a Light on Failure
Let’s shine a bright light on my most recent learning opportunity. I know that we need to grow a potential customer base for Closet Minimal before we launch so we’re not greeted by crickets when we have product ready to sell. Not just potential customers, but people who believe in what we believe. People who we can reach out to participate in user research, because it’s important for us to keep human-centered design principles at the core of how we work to refine our product and our company.
The Plan: A Book Giveaway
I have a hypothesis. Successful people read books, and our customers want to be successful people. Therefore giving away books on topics they are interested in would resonate with our potential customers.
Based on this hypothesis, I suggested a book giveaway to my co-founders as a way to find our people. I wrote up a plan for how we could do different books throughout the year, rotating through books about minimalism, about iconic figures who are known for having personal uniforms (like Steve Jobs and Barack Obama), and other interests we think our customers might be into.
The book about Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson seemed like the perfect first book giveaway, since Steve Jobs is the example that often comes to people’s minds when we explain personal uniforms.
Creating the Giveaway
I started researching giveaways, learning that they’re actually “sweepstakes” and how there are rules to follow and terms and conditions you need to provide. I wrote our first privacy policy, because we would be collecting data as part of the sweepstakes. I learned how make tweet-able links with pre-filled text.
It was so complicated just putting it all together that I made a service blueprint to capture all the services used and how they linked together. This way we’d have a map to guide us for any future giveaways.
Low Expectations, Even Lower Results
I knew the giveaway wouldn’t be wildly successful. I predicted that 30 people would sign up for the book giveaway over the course of a month. My husband said he doubted I’d get three. As of the writing of this article, I have exactly three entries (hah!).
If I Low Expectations, Why Did I Do It?
I wanted to get over my stage fright. To practice singing in the auditorium before it gets filled with people. To get a feel for what it’s like to stand on that stage. To start practicing over and over and over again such that even when there is a crowd, the stage feels like home.
Own the Failure, Own the Learnings
1 I naively thought that I’d be trying to reach out to strangers who are interested in Steve Jobs. What I realize now is that our first potential customers are among people I’m already connected with (and the second degree connections from them). That means I need a different approach to community building for Closet Minimal than I thought I would.
2 I should have listened to the advice about keeping a giveaway to one or two weeks in length. However that advice talked about keeping it short due to how exhausting it is, which didn’t resonate with me. I didn’t see this as something that would need lots of activity because I expected it to have a very small response. What I didn’t anticipate was that I would quickly feel embarrassed about repeating myself on social media — because I didn’t realize I’d really be talking to the same people the whole time (see failure #1).
3 The book choice was another failure. It’s an older book by now, so you’ve probably already read it if you wanted to read it. The appeal of the book is polarizing — either you want to read it or you don’t. Next time I should get a pulse on what people are intrigued about reading now, but not convinced enough yet to have already bought it. Now I know that I can use my existing network to vet out ideas beforehand (again, see failure #1).
What’s Next
I know what we’ll do differently before our next book giveaway. I still believe my hypothesis has merit, that our type of people have a growth mindset and resonate with reading books on intriguing topics.
Putting my voice out there as a co-founder led to other good things too. I discovered a supporter from my Twitter network who inspired me to start a new community building experiment, and helped kick it off with our first guest blog post — thanks Rachel Ma!
Saara Kamppari-Miller
Design Strategy, User Experience Design, Interaction Design
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