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- 🧱 Hit a WALL With Your Idea? Failing? Let's Talk About It.
🧱 Hit a WALL With Your Idea? Failing? Let's Talk About It.
Aron Meystedt
November 08, 2024
In partnership with
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🙋♂️ Hello!
Let’s talk about the frustration of failing.
But first…
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Ok, let’s talk…
🚫 First — Keep Your Day Job
This is the single best piece of advice that can help you.
I get it — you have huge dreams, and you are excited about your idea.
✅ But, starting something brand new takes time — more time than you realize — (more on that in a bit) because your product’s first version won’t be the one you actually launch.
If you quit your job, you’ll put intense pressure on yourself to figure this out too quickly, and you’ll likely skip steps and you’ll fail to validate correctly.
Because…
🕵️♂️ Remember, You’re a Detective
Launching a startup is more like being a detective who puts together a puzzle — and it’s less like the excitement you see in movies where people are writing code and then magic happens.
If you approach your startup as if you are a detective and not a founder, you’ll have the right mindset to handle failures.
This is you. A detective. An experimenter. I’m not sure why the magnifying glass is FLOATING??!! Well, that’s AI image generation for you.
💔 Failure is Important and Common
1️⃣ WD-40 is called WD-40 because they got the formula right on the 40th try.
2️⃣ Do you know how many attempts it took James Dyson to get this vacuum to work? He nailed it after creating 5,127 prototypes! Good Lord, James. It took him 15 years!
3️⃣ Thomas Edison tested over 1000 materials before finding the right filament for the light bulb.
💡 What’s the point?
🧩 Failure is Inevitable in the Startup Journey
You absolutely can’t start something new without failing. A lot. So, you need to be able to handle rejection, ridicule and messing up. If you can’t, then starting something might be too stressful.
👉 But remember, you aren’t really failing. You’re performing tests. You’re learning what people want and what they don’t. And you have to have conversations with people to find that out. And you’ll get rejected along the way.
And you need to create SOMETHING to find out what works and what doesn’t. And that’s where the real heartache comes in — because you’ve actually created something new, put it out there into the world, and sometimes — no one cares.
That is the part that is extremely frustrating. It’s one thing to fail privately, but to fail publicly, it’s tough.
💡 But, you know what, it’s not as embarrassing as you think.
Less people are keeping track of your life and failures than you think. No one wakes up with you on their mind — which is good and bad 😄.
It’s bad because you have to fight for attention and traction, but it’s good because you can repeatedly fail in virtual anonymity.
Think of failure as FEEDBACK
Did you make something that no one bought? That’s fine as long as you find out WHY they didn’t buy — and implement that feedback into the next version.
Only failure can help open your eyes to a new problem and see things from a new perspective. We often have tunnel vision, as we are in love with our original idea.
✅ I test things, with you, in my newsletter every day. I write about certain topics… I experiment with formats… and I monitor the open rates, polls and responses to determine what you really want. It’s part of it. You have to experiment and see yourself as a researcher and implement what you learn.
👀 I want you to see this
This might make you feel better…
Slack
Inception to Successful Launch: 5 years
Originally founded as a gaming company in 2009, Slack pivoted to a messaging platform after their video game failed to gain traction.
Inception to Popular Launch: 2 years
Launched in 2010 after several iterations and nearly two years of limited traction, Pinterest grew slowly and required several redesigns and new features before having success in 2012.
Inception to Popular Launch: 2 years
Twitter began as a side project within a company called Odeo, which was initially focused on podcasting. After several failed attempts in podcasting, they pivoted to Twitter in 2006.
Shopify
Pivot from Online Snowboard Store to E-commerce Platform (3 years)
Wait what?
They started in 2004 as an online store selling snowboarding equipment, the founders realized there was a shortage of good ecommerce solutions. They created their own platform and pivoted to offer it as Shopify in 2007.
✅ If you feel like you are onto something, and are facing failure, keep going.
Yes, there is a time to quit — but if you’ve validated there’s a clear need in the market, it might be a matter of time until you solve this.
✅ Perhaps you need to dive back into the customers, find out why your current solution isn’t the one for them, and roll out a new iteration.
👇👇👇
The best advice is to launch something. Get SOMETHING in front of customers and take their feedback (even if it’s negative) to help you put the puzzle together.
🤖 Our AI Tool:
Don’t’ start from behind, use our Market Feasibility AI Tool. Try it! It’s FREE. 👇
👉 Here is the direct link if the image doesn’t show up: Market Feasibility AI Tool
🌎 What Others Say About Failure
"Success is not final, failure is not fatal: It is the courage to continue that counts."
“I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.”
“It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all—in which case, you fail by default.”
“Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.”
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