This is what you learn from failing your startup
This is the transcript of my talk at FuckUp Nights in Rotterdam on May 3rd.
I messed up my startup, and I’m humbled and grateful to be sharing my experience and lessons.
To give you a bit of background, let’s go back to October 2016.
I moved to Tel Aviv to finish my Master’s Degree. I don’t know if any of you have ever been there, but it’s hard to not get inspired by the startup spirit. The country breaths innovation and entrepreneurship.
Seriously, when you ask three random strangers on the street, one has already founded his/her own startup and the other two are working on their concept.
Being surrounded by all these startups, I thought I’d identified an opportunity and wanted to start myself.
With a Master’s Degree at a first-level business school, experience advising startups, new business development and strategy, I figured I had all the right papers.
What could go wrong?
And so, extremely inspired, I went to speak to a couple of serial entrepreneurs and asked them: “I want to learn how to start a startup. What do I do?”
I don’t know whether all these entrepreneurs have some affiliation with Nike, but it turns out almost all entrepreneurs agree about this:
Just do it.
And so I decided I wanted to be part of this crew. I wanted to change the world as well. I wanted to work on big problems, and make an impact on other people’s lives.
And so I took the leap and faced my insecurity.
What my year looked like
My startup was called 02Traction, the step-by-step guide that would democratize entrepreneurship. It’d be revolutionary software to accelerate the process from idea to traction.
I was basically building a startup for startups.
And so I started looking for customers, building the solution I thought would help entrepreneurs, and talking to investors — doing everything I thought would bring me closer to my vision.
I thought I had a pretty good preparation with my business degree and startup experience, but I was completely caught off guard.
Most people say starting a startup is hard.
It’s the biggest understatement ever.
A rollercoaster would be a better description…
- Nothing can prepare you for this. You essentially you have no idea what you’re doing 90% of the time.
- You have an idea about what might work. 90% of the time it doesn’t.
- No one understand what you’re doing. Or why.
I could share dozens of micro-f*ck-ups about everything I did that didn’t work.
- I built a website that lead to 0 conversions.
- I ran a Facebook Ads campaign that didn’t result in anything valuable.
- I spent 1,5 months on market research hoping it’d tell me where exactly the opportunity was. It resulted in nothing.
So I spent quite some time thinking about what exactly it feels like. Then I came across this picture, and I think it describes it the best.
I basically felt like the stormtrooper — I felt my opportunity was close, but I just couldn’t grasp it.
I don’t think I’m a very insecure guy, but the levels of insecurity were hard to deal with.
But of all things, the worst thing was the feeling that all time spent not working on your startup meant no progress. This ultimately lead to a lot of sacrifices.
- I wasn’t there when my first nephew was born, and basically missed his first seven months…
- I had to tell my girlfriend that I wasn’t coming home after four months…
- I stopped talking to friends who didn’t help me create value…
So to say a startup is hard — that’s just the BIGGEST understatement.
Fast-forward one year.
I’m back in Rotterdam, sipping coffee in my best friend’s coffee bar. I was reflecting on what I’d learned, what I wanted to get out of this and whether my current route was the optimal one.
And so it happened that, almost a year after deciding to just do it, I decided I didn’t want to be part of the ‘just-do-it’ crew.
I decided to move on.
This brings me to my first learning.
Quitting vs. Moving On
My first learning is that there’s a crossroad between quitting and moving on.
Let me explain.
While I was sitting in my best friend’s cafe, I realized that the reason I once wanted to start a startup was:
- to grow.
- to learn.
- to have fun and inspire others.
- to make an impact on other people’s lives.
- to work on the biggest challenges in a creative way.
- to help those pushing the boundaries to push them harder.
What I found out is that all of these things, I’m way more capable of doing in an existing team.
I can learn, grow, have fun, inspire, impact others, work on big problems and push the boundaries by working in a team.
This way, it didn’t feel like quitting, but rather having found new information on a map called “life” that allowed me to move from my current path to a new, better one.
I encountered my own crossroad, and decided to take the ‘move on’ route.
So was it a year wasted? Absolutely not. I think there’s nothing I could’ve done this year that would have brought me closer to my goal to learn and develop myself.
This brings me to my second point.
Combining Vision and Passion → Invincible
If you work from vision and passion, failure is impossible.
I’m currently still working on my vision, but together with a team of extremely passionate entrepreneurs and product managers. I’m still able to creatively solve problems and work on my passion for change-makers.
And so, even though my own startup never took off, I didn’t fail. Everything I’ve learned, I’ve taken along with me.
If you choose projects that align with your values and visions, they’ll surely give you transferable skills and relationships. Even if you don’t manage to take your startup off the ground, you can use those skills and relationships.
The way I try to explain that to other startups I work with is with the following picture.
You see, if you fail, you just didn’t chase the right goals, strategy, tactics and activities. However, you’ve learned a lot, and can continue to work on your vision somewhere else.
While we’re talking about learning, here’s my third lesson:
Prioritize Learning
I just want to check something. By show of hands, who here feels that university prepared you to deal with failure?
That’s what I thought…
One of the things I realize now is that universities only prepare us to succeed. I’m really grateful for having gotten the opportunity to attend a premier business school, but to be honest: it did a terrible job at preparing me for failing.
My metric for success was completely wrong and gave me a really hard time.
Let me explain.
It’s awesome because I’m privileged to have my two favorite women here: my girlfriend and my mom. My mom is the one who once told me something that I think is crucial to share here:
Things either work or you learn from them.
I think this is something that’s crucial to dealing with failure. Everyone here probably already realizes this, but I want to repeat this.
You see, we’re all programmed for success. The hardest thing you’ll do is failing at something. The true value of life, though, only start to show its head when you start failing. You’re not getting the most out of life if you don’t fail. Failing is how you expand yourself and grow.
And so I shifted my metric for success from outcome to process — my success became personal growth and development.
This is because in the end, failure is nothing more than an experiment with an unexpected outcome.
Now this is easier said than done. The way I’ve found out works best for me is replacing the word failed with experimented. When you do that, something beautiful happens:
- “I failed my startup” becomes “I experimented with my startup.”
- “I failed” becomes “I experimented”
- “I’m a failure” becomes “I’m an experimenter”
This way, every failure, every moment of hardship and every second, minute and hour of anguish brings with it the potential of a similar or even greater benefit.
This made pitching to customers are lot easier. This made trying new ways of marketing a lot easier. This made everything I was uncomfortable a lot easier. Because if this didn’t work out, the outcome would always be positive — because I would have learned something new.
As you work through failure, you’ll really deepen into the human being you’re capable of being.
If you ever find yourself in a situation where things are not going according to plan, think about this wise person telling you: things either work, or you learn from them.
Bad Decisions Make Good Stories
Finally, if there’s anything you take from my talk here, please take this to heart:
Bad decisions make good stories.
Looking back on my journey, I would’ve done a dozen things different, but it’s the past — and what’s passed is done. So all that remains today is a whole bunch of lessons and a good story.
Call to Action
You’re going to fail to make the most out of life and yourself if you fail to chase more failures.
So if there’s one thing I want you to do is ask yourself this:
What can you do to take more risks?
Two last things…
If you liked this article, please do 👏 and share it with your friends. Remember, you can clap up to 50 times — it really makes a big difference for me.
