Don’t Fail Fast; Recognize Failure Fast

You’re Already Failing — The Hard Part is Knowing Why

I was recently sitting with a man much smarter than myself who said that when his company releases an app, they can tell if it will fail within a week. He also told me that his team had released 30 apps that were failures prior to their current app, which currently sits in the top 10 on the App Store.

This information stuck with me because I can recall the second that I knew Momunt wouldn’t succeed. It was three days after we launched, I was in India for my co-founder’s wedding, and jet lag had me unable to sleep and constantly refreshing the graph below:

In our case, we had launched on a big stage and gotten ourselves a quick bit of attention. You can see this spike on March 2. By March 5, that initial spike in users had become bored and decided we weren’t the next big thing. And moved on.

Recognize Failure

We’ve all heard the adage, “Fail Fast,” and many of us have also heard “fail often,” but these platitudes are fairly useless. Driving the wrong way down a one-way street doesn’t get you anywhere — especially when driving fast. Failure is useless if you don’t recognize what exactly is going wrong.

30 Apps For One Success

It’s not a fluke that the company that has gone through 30 app variants has a successful product trending in the top 10 on the App Store. Product learning, understanding, and iteration is crucial for discovering that perfect magical formula that keeps your audience coming back for more. It’s hard for us to recognize that each of our hard-earned app releases is really just a single pitch. Calling our shot and hitting it out of the park on the first pitch is so unlikely.

Your First Guess Is Probably Wrong

Products succeed and fail on whether or not they create a new or better experience for the user that is so compelling that they change the user’s current habits. The retention graph above is familiar to anyone and everyone who has released a product that didn’t break through. If you see a leaky bucket graph like the one I shared above, it doesn’t mean that your core concept is wrong — it simply means the product isn’t good enough to switch users’ habits. In fact, getting users to jump on board only to have them leave is a great statement that the market exists, but your product didn’t hit the sweet spot.

Fail In The Right Direction

When Momunt was first failing, we knew our touch controls had a lot to do with the lack of retention. Fixing the interaction design increased user retention, but not enough. This second version showed us loud and clear that a more definitive pivot was required. We’re in the process of releasing this new project, Zero Slant, to the world, but the ideas and concepts that formed this new product began in Momunt. Driving the wrong direction on the street with Momunt taught us a tremendous amount about the market and we’re confidently hopeful that the new application won’t be the three-day-old leaky bucket that Momunt was.

NOTE TO SELF— this is only really app three…that’s nowhere near 30. Man I hope 30 isn’t the magic number.

As always you can reach me at ryan@zeroslant.com