Learning to Fail Better

Try, fail, learn, try again, fail better!

After nearly two decades in consulting, I decided to branch out and start a product business.

This was because, in consulting, you only have a few options to increase revenue. You can work more, charge more, and become a 3rd party reseller.

Working more comes from either putting in more hours yourself or hiring others to work for you. Charging more is driven by improving skills, obtaining credentials, and marketing to increase the perceived value. While these are both good options, they have limited leverage due to their dependency on time and labor.

The reseller option, while also possible, can raise questions of independence depending on your customers and industry. For my business, it would help to generate some initial revenues. The downside is that over the longer term, I believe it would negatively impact my brand, as independence and transparency are core to the value I deliver.

Product businesses, on the contrary, can have much better leverage if structured properly. The overall concept is that you make the asset, market it, and drive repeated sales through multiple channels. The key factor is that there are no direct relationships between the number of hours worked in the day or the number of people on staff.

SaaS businesses take this concept further, as they have no physical inventory or shipping limits. The main costs come from additional support capacity and underlying computing resources.

Jumping into SaaS

Based on this, I jumped into SaaS with both feet and a strong bias toward action. I found a product idea, hired a team, and got to work within just a few days.

Fast forward ten months and $50,000, and it all ended without as much as a single sale. I made countless mistakes. It wasn't until then that I started talking with prospects and realized that I had built a product no one wanted. To make things worse, even my goal of scratching my own itch had failed. The underlying computing costs made the product cost-prohibitive without at least dozens of paying customers.

While I knew I was doing the right thing, the day I shut things down felt like I got kicked in the stomach, and since then, I've learned to fail faster and cheaper. I can now go from failure to recovery, gain the lessons learned, and start trying again in a few days.

The trick was to pick an ambitious goal to work towards that was large enough to force me to grow to achieve it. From there, failing was just part of the learning process. While failing still sucks, recovering and moving forward has become easier.

The key takeaways are; to try, fail, learn, try again, and fail better, all while avoiding terminal failures which would make it impossible to try again.

Try Again. Fail Again. Fail Better. - Samuel Beckett

In the next issue, I'll share my approach to ensure I'm making something people want while minimizing the downside.

What I'm Reading

I'm listening to a great book by Rob Walling called Start Small, Stay Small: A Developer's Guide to Launching a Startup. The book was published in 2010, so many links and apps mentioned are either broken or not around anymore, but the concepts are still solid.

SaaS Community

I recently joined a Slack group called MicroConf Connect, focusing on SaaS businesses. It's been a great resource. It has a few thousand people covering all topics of starting, running, and growing a SaaS business.

Substack Note

In my last post, I shared a message from Substack. I used the platform to host my website, newsletter, podcast (coming soon), and chat. All of these extras are completely optional. The core content will always be sent in the newsletter and hosted on the website. All the extras are completely optional.

Until next time, please send me your questions and feedback. If you're also working on building a business, let me know if there is anything I can do to help.