Add stuff to your entrepreneur backpack as you fail fast and often
The positive outcomes of failure while executing your ideas
Last week I posted about the many abandoned projects that developers +entrepreneurs (devtrepreneurs) leave behind after years of impulsively executing every exciting idea that goes through their minds.
A few hours after I shared that post, comments and feedback started to come in. One particular comment by a friend reminded me of something worth sharing more about. The comment was something like this:
“despite all, you learn a lot and it helps you build a portfolio”
That is true and it’s something other entrepreneurs often talk about at events like barcamp, fuckup-nights, TEDx, etc.
So … mmm … why would I want to build a portfolio of failures?
Well, its not that plain and simple. It’s not like you have to look for failure every time you execute your ideas and somehow the accumulation of those failed projects will make you a winner.
It’s really more about the accumulation of learning, new ideas, relationships (expand your network) and experiences in fields far away from your comfort zone, as well as skills and resources you can later use on new projects.
On each stage of the idea execution you add one or more of those items to your “entrepreneur backpack”. From the inception of the idea, all the way to its successful execution and growth to a sustainable business, a ugly and messy failure or simply abandoning it to go on pursuit of your next new billion-dollar idea, a lot of things happen each day of that journey.
1) Inception of the Idea
When you first have an idea, it all starts in your head. You start daydreaming about how it will be amazing, how it will become a billion-dollar business and you will be the famous founder-and-CEO of it.
All that is great, but unless you do something to turn that idea into a reality, it all just stays in your head. There is no outcome at all… no success, no failure… nothing.
You win nothing, you lose nothing… and some (most) people simply stop there… on the idea stage. Probably because the fear of failure is too big and they prefer to stay in their comfort zone.
But there are some others who decide to do something about it. They decide to take the first step. Usually that first step is simply to tell others about their idea.
2) First time sharing your idea with others
This is your first win… deciding to do something to execute your idea. Here is where the learning an accumulation of good and bad experiences begins.
When you start telling others about your idea, you overcome the first set of fears. The most common fear is that “they will steal my idea”. Other common fears include: “they’ll think its a dumb idea”, “they will not get it”, “it already exists”, etc.
By talking to others about your ideas, you start warming up the muscles required to innovate and create new projects out of abstract ideas. The feedback your receive helps you shape the idea further and bring it closer to reality.
Also it helps you clarify the value proposition and the best ways to pitch your idea in short and understandable sentences. It’s sort of your first market research exercise where you identify if the idea has any potential market-fit and how to sell it / pitch it to that target market.
One of the most important things you win by talking about your ideas are the new relations and contacts you add to your network. It opens new doors and helps you break the ice with new people you meet. Your friends start making intros with others who might be able to help you execute your ideas.
In the end, even if you don’t execute your idea, you walk out of this stage with a larger network of contacts and some experience clarifying your thoughts and distilling them down to a pitch that makes sense. These new contacts can lead to other projects, jobs, friendships and experiences that you wouldn’t have if you hadn’t open your mouth to talk about your idea in the first place.
3) Execution
“ideas don’t matter, only execution matters”
Many blog posts, articles and books have been written about the importance of the execution over the idea. Once you’ve shared the idea with others, if all goes well, you usually get more excited about the potential of it becoming a reality and start working on it.
As we discussed earlier, if the ideas never leave your head then nothing will happen. When you talk to others about your idea, you start feeling the obligation and commitment to go forward with it.
This is the stage where you actually start dedicating resources to turning your idea into a reality. If you are a designer, then you would start sketching out how it looks like. If you are a developer, you would start designing the database models, flowcharts and coding the initial prototype or proof of concept.
You could spend as little as a weekend or as long as a few years on this execution stage, and here is where you learn hard and soft skills related to the project execution, develop and consolidate work relations, alliances and other assets that you will accumulate and store in your “entrepreneur backpack” for future use on this or other projects.
If your execution is great and timely (right place, right time) you might never leave this stage. It will become a successful business and will become the work of your life… your legacy.
However, not all projects succeed and failure is part of the process. Most of your first few (or dozen) attempts will fail. The important part is to go ahead and execute, accumulate the lessons, relations and skills that you acquire as you go through the process.
“Life is a journey, not a destination.”
4) Abandoned Children and Zombies
When ideas and projects fail, entrepreneurs are often reluctant to let them go. Instead of shutting them down completely, they leave them out there just existing… without much attention or resources for their sustained grow.
I wrote some thoughts about this on another post. Now I want to expand more about the two categories where these failed projects end:
- Abandoned Children
These are the projects that you care a lot about, you love them because you came up with the idea, then you started talking about it with friends, you started working on them… devoting time, effort, money and saw them grow up. They are cute ideas that a lot of people liked and used, but never grew up to a level where they would become successful adults (real businesses).
So, in the context of web or mobile apps, you leave these out on the web or on the app stores, just running on their own. You don’t have the heart to kill them, but they suffer from being abandoned and not receiving any attention (app updates) and eventually have a slow and silent death. - Zombies
These are projects that were not your initial idea, but probably a friend’s that you joined forces with as partners or a client that you started working with and eventually became so involved in the product development that ended up owning a lot of responsibilities in the maintenance and ongoing development. Since you are not calling the shots and you don’t necessarily love the project (but your partner does) it never gets shutdown. After years of being out on the market it never grows to the sustainability it needs, but your partner refuses to kill it… and you have to keep on doing whatever you do on that project (develop, maintain, keep the servers running, etc) … these projects are the zombies that keep on coming back and will never die.
These two categories of failed projects can also teach us many lessons… specially “learning to say no” and not spreading yourself too thin working on an excessive number of concurrent projects. That is a valuable tool to store in your backpack.
5) Pulling the Plug
When you learn how to say no, you also develop a sixth sense for detecting which ideas you’d want to dedicate time an effort to and which will eventually end up as abandoned children or zombies. As a result you simply pass on those. You become more selective.
However, even with that radar that prevents you from start working on ideas for which you are predisposed to failure, you still end up with some exciting ideas that don’t show those characteristics upfront, but as you work on them you start recognizing certain patterns that raise those red flags.
“Fail Fast, Fail Often”
The skill to “pull the plug quickly” or what many startup and entrepreneurship literature refers to as “fail fast, fail often” is a useful addition to your backpack.
This doesn’t mean that you want to keep on failing every time, or that you enjoy the pain that comes with failure. It means that you have to be open to failure, accept that it’s part of the innovation process, recognize it quickly and be quick to pull the plug when needed. Life is too short to waste it on things you don’t want to do and instead you should move to the next thing.
Keep adding to your backpack
When you move on to your next project you’ll have a backpack full of tools to help you succeed… and if you don’t succeed, you’d add more useful stuff for future use.
Failing is not the end of the game, it’s just part of the process. With each failure, abandoned child or zombie project, you add more tools to your backpack. You create and grow your portfolio, enhance your resume, add hard and soft skills, expand your network of contacts in a variety of industries, work with others that can vouch for you in the future (references and recommendations) and eventually, being in the right place, at the right time and with the right execution you will finally succeed.
I am still on that journey, since my first entrepreneurial venture in 1997. I have not stopped executing, learning and expanding my network. Now… almost twenty years after it, I have been able to build a successful resume as an entrepreneur, my full time job and main source of income comes from a company I started and still continue to come up with new ideas, collaborate and make new partnerships, execute with the help of a great team and network, learn, abandon and kill projects… adding new tools to my backpack on every step of the journey.
