

You will fail - DanielBMarkham
http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2010/01/you-will-fail.php

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jacquesm
Since I'm mentioned in the post I'll put my $0.02 in the bag here.

The you'll probably fail comment was meant as a reality check because I think
that the commercial success of that particular project is doubtful, even if
the project itself is a success in terms of execution and use.

Simply because it targets a niche. But I'm really happy Daniel bit the bullet
and built it because I think it is a useful thing to have.

The 'Failure is not an option' mentality that some seem to bring to the start-
up scene always has me in stitches, because it is really terribly naive to
think that somehow you are different and bullet proof. After a couple of
failures you begin to get the hang of how to avoid failure in the ways that
you've already seen before, and you find new, interesting ways to fail.

But everytime you 'fail', you also simultaneously succeed, you succeed in
learning, in educating yourself. Three failed start-ups is probably the
equivalent of a badge of merit and positions you very well for a possible
success the fourth or the fifth time. It's not _just_ luck, it is a
combination of a lot of factors:

    
    
      - idea
    
      - timing
      
      - team
    
      - execution
    
      - luck
    
      - interaction with customers / audience
    
      - market development
    

All those have to go your way to hit one out of the park. But at the same time
you could be defining success as for instance building a site that attracts
more than 'x' visitors per day, or being ramen profitable, or being able to
live comfortably of your product.

If I look back across the years my own score is a mixed bag:

    
    
      - successful consultancy business
    
      - successful license business
    
      - homerun on the webcam stuff
    
      - a string of 'moderately successful' (as in lots of 
        users but not much $)
    
      - two major losses
    
      - a string of failures, most of them small ideas 
        worked out over a period of days, weeks or months.
    

If you're not prepared to 'take your lumps' the success will also never be
yours, so plan ahead, know that if you start a project you can skew the odds a
bit in your favor by manipulating those factors that are directly under your
control and if you fail make sure you get the maximum mileage of your
'failure' in terms of study points.

Then try again, with the odds more in your favor because of your increased
knowledge. One day you _will_ succeed.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
Sorry JacquesM -- didn't mean to "out" you. After all, I left off the M!

As usual, you are dead-on target with your comments.

You are also going to owe me dinner for your prediction it won't be a
commercial success. Once it is, we're going to sit down and have a nice meal
of roasted crow prepared for you to eat :)

~~~
jacquesm
You're on ;)

The crow will taste really good, because I really hope that it will work out.
Whoever modded you down needs to get a sense of humor installed, or their
current one fixed.

------
wallflower
I had the opportunity to recently watch an Akira Kurosawa film called Ikiru. A
beautiful, not overly sentimental film about what someone can do with their
life once they are determined to make something with it. Reading this article
saddens me because it's positioning failure as an inevitability - but what is
really failure? Isn't failure just part of the learning curve?

As someone wiser than me said, it's:

    
    
        you -> failure -> failure -> success
    
        not
    
        failure <- you -> success

~~~
xcombinator
Agree, and failure is such a strong word:

Did Guttemberg failed because he spend all his life trying to make a mobile
types print and he died poor?

Did facebook founders failed because their original idea didn't catch? Or the
flickr people? or the Photoshop creator? or Googleearth inventor?.

Did Edison failed with every new light bulb he tried and burn?. The rocket
engineers when some of their rockets exploded?

Stop calling it "failures", they are opportunities.

------
thaumaturgy
I get what you're trying to say: be prepared for failure, don't take it too
hard, and if you're really interested in this kind of stuff, then try again.

But: I think that this attitude is one of the things that separates the lucky
entrepreneurs from the skilled entrepreneurs. As difficult as a small business
can be, the attitude that failure is acceptable can mean the difference
between giving up (and moving on to the next idea) or pushing on and actually
becoming successful.

Others have said this better, but basically, I'd rather bet on the founders
and businesses that refuse to fail.

~~~
nostrademons
The problem is that success has many different definitions, and to succeed at
one of them, you often have to fail at several others.

For example, say that an entrepreneur has this burning idea for a
revolutionary new MMORPG, one based around social interaction instead of hack
'n slash. They find out that very few people _care_ , but in the course of
building it, they end up building an easy way to share photos online. Should
they keep pushing through with their original idea and refuse to fail? Or
should they admit that their original idea was kinda useless and go with what
people actually want?

This happens over and over again. The podcasting company that realizes their
product is lame and invents a way to broadcast 140-character messages by SMS.
The server-side JavaScript framework that nobody uses who decides to build a
collaborative editing app on top of it. The guys who wanted to put art
galleries online, then discover that art galleries don't want to _be_ online
and so branch out into general online stores. The HotOrNot clone that compares
Harvard students with barnyard animals, then gets busted by the administration
and becomes a social network instead.

Problem is that it's not usually possible to tell, a priori, which ideas
deserve to fail and which ones will succeed given a bit more effort. Imagine
if someone had told Larry Page that his idea to crawl the web and look at the
link structure was stupid, and he'd be much better off with a web portal. And
that's why entrepreneurship is hard.

~~~
thaumaturgy
I agree with everything you say, but I didn't get the sense that the original
article was about iteration.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
It wasn't. It was just about being able to accept that whatever idea you
started out with either is going to fizzle or "evolve" so much that you can't
be thinking that one idea will somehow get you through. Instead be prepared to
have several ideas, perhaps in many different fields.

People like telling the story of the team who started going one way and ended
up somewhere else, successfully, because it conforms to their idea that some
kind of attribute must be a discriminating factor (in this case the team is
that factor). But I simply don't know if that's a true statement or not. I'd
bet that many times it's just a dice roll whether team X can handle as many
pivots that are necessary to make it all in one go. That's from my
observations of lots of teams, but it's just a guess.

GP hit the nail on the head: good entrepreneurship means knowing when to hang
on and when to iterate. And there are no books for that one.

I think that because our brains love order, and because we're always trying to
put order on everything we see even if it's not there, we take lots of
cognitive leaps to build some kind of mental model on "what it takes to
succeed". With the "great teams succeed" model, the brain has a field day
because selection bias and circular reasoning is in full-force. Whatever your
model is, however, it should include the role of chance or you're likely to be
really disappointed. And life is too short to get so distraught over the part
that chance takes in getting started.

------
dgreensp
I'm unmoved by the statement "Most start-ups fail", or "Most X fail/suck" for
any X. Why should a bunch of people failing deter you, or make you think you
are going to fail? Yes, doing a start-up means applying your personal
resources in order to succeed where others have failed. So does publishing a
successful book or song, or winning a medal in the Olympics, or succeeding at
any "venture" or uncertain quest in life or trying to achieve any special
recognition.

Is succeeding luck or skill? The article basically claims it's all luck in the
case of a start-up. This is a terrible attitude for anything involving skill!
Successful people are often those who had confidence in their ability and
applied themselves ruthlessly.

What limits a competitor in the Olympics, their own ability or capacity to
train, or the other competitors who will determine their rank? What limits a
book's success, the skill of the author, or the fickle market? The more you
understand the market, of course, the more you take what would otherwise be
luck and turn it into an opportunity for skill. And if you know what kinds of
scores you're competing against in the Olympics and have a sense of your own
ability, competing in the Olympics is hardly a foolish idea.

Different Olympic sports provide different kinds of competition. For
sprinting, good genetics may give you a strong leg up. For figure skating,
your confidence, grace, ability to function under pressure, and hours of
training will make you a star.

For start-ups in particular, it's ultimately quite silly to chock everything
up to luck. A tech start-up is just good engineering plus good business (and
marketing, design, etc.). If you focus just on the engineering, I'm sure it
can feel like bad luck when a competitor overtakes you, and likewise if you
focus on just the business side in an area requiring strong engineering. But
put it all together and it's definitely something one can get good at.

That said, the knowledge and ability to "keep trying" is an asset in itself,
so more power to the author. Fortunately, there is much to learn and much
skill to develop!

~~~
DanielBMarkham
_The article basically claims it's all luck in the case of a start-up_

Er no it doesn't. I wrote it.

The point is that knowledge and skills are incremental, not pivotal. Startups
are like baseball -- you play the numbers. Every time-at-bat isn't a home run,
no matter how many skills you have. But if you take that to mean you shouldn't
work on your batting skill then you've read something in there that I never
intended.

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theli0nheart
Not caring about failing is a better attitude than thinking that you probably
will fail. People who are obsessed with failure or success aren't focused on
the right thing. What matters is that you build something that people want to
use.

That's all. No more stupid mantras.

------
teralaser
You have to succeed.

From the moment you're born, odds are stacked against you, chances of getting
born in a industrialized country is 20%, of being intelligent enough to read
(or care about) this is <1%, to not fail education it's 80%, to get hired
somewhere is 0.3-3% (per application), to not get fired or be unemployed is
80%... To not toil at a J.O.B. = Just Over Broke is 40% and so on...

And your startup isn't just some bakery store or corner drug-store as is also
included in some government statistics.

So go ahead and succeed!

------
chrischen
You only fail if you give up. Your first iteration will most likely fail
because you don't have enough experience to know what works. If you can
quickly and objectively identify what doesn't work, get rid of it, and try
something else, then you'll only fail a little bit (but who cares). It's not
over until it's over. By the way when I say "try something new," I could mean
the color of a button, or the whole idea.

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praptak
The article reminds me of a Go proverb: "Lose your first fifty games as soon
as possible."
([http://senseis.xmp.net/?LoseYourFirst50GamesAsQuicklyAsPossi...](http://senseis.xmp.net/?LoseYourFirst50GamesAsQuicklyAsPossible))

