Fail fast, but don’t fail
You hear the term all the time, “fail fast”. I hear people talking about it all the time in the context of trying something, if it fails, move onto the next thing. I also hear people preaching failing fast, but then sit on a traction-less project for a super long time thinking that the next bit of work will give them the push they need. What people rarely talk about is what to do with the failures they’ve “achieved”
Don’t just fail, learn from it
When i was a kid, I did well in school, but had the occasional bad grade. The first time I brought home a bad great is one I’ll never forget. I failed a test and my parents had to sign it. I got the grade back on a Friday, but didn’t let my parents know about it until Sunday evening… After all, i wanted to enjoy the weekend! Needless to say, my parents were LIVID. From that point forward, I knew better than hide bad grades from my parents. They weren’t mad that I got a bad grade, they were mad because I kept it from them. What I didn’t realize back then was that they taught me an extremely valuable lesson. Throughout the rest of my school years, whenever I brought home a bad grade, my parents would always have me go through my mistakes and make sure I can then find the right answer; not just put the test in a pile. You can fail the test or quiz, but you can still do well in the class. As a result, I never failed a class until college; when during my first semester, I forgot that lesson.
Well, this lesson I learned does not talk about the speed at which i failed a test, but it did teach me HOW to bounce back from a failure and one can apply this lesson to software, or entrepreneurship, or anything that has the chance of failing. If a feature that is built fails, the worst thing you can do is let it sit. The second worst thing you can do is not reflect on the failures IMMEDIATELY, and do what you can to ensure that you know why you’ve failed. What did you learn from your mistake? Most importantly, how do you use what you’ve learned to ensure that you pass the class… Err i mean get that extra group of users signed up or get to that next revenue milestone.
Failing fast; 2 words, 2 parts
There are two key ingredients to failing fast, the failing part, and the learning. Not just fail and move on. The key is to have the correct metrics in place to be able to reflect on failures quickly. Whether it’s a grade on a test, or google analytics, or your conversion rate after a google adWords campaign. Pay attention to the numbers, immediately and consistently. Looking at your analytics data once per month or talking to your customers every 6 months is not how you can detect failures quickly. Had I told my parents on Friday evening that I failed, my punishment would not have been nearly as bad as it was 2 days later. If you look at your numbers immediately, your punishment won’t be as bad as it will be if you wait for users to complain.
By looking at the numbers immediately and consistently, and reflecting on why they are what they are, you can move quickly to correct the failure.
Applying this lesson now
In 2007, I started working on a startup called My Grocery Buddy(MGB). During which time, I forgot the valuable lesson I learned in grade school. I worked on MGB until mid 2010 without many results. Yeah I had a webapp; thought it was ugly. Yes, I built an iphone app, it was ugly and clunky. No, no one used it, not even me. I had to force myself to use the app at times. But I kept at it, on and off, on a single path with little to no reflection on what our problems were. Finally, I decided to give it a rest.
One of the reasons I decided to move on from MGB was that I decided to pursue the top idea in my head. As Paul Graham says, “…I’d say it’s hard to do a really good job on anything you don’t think about in the shower.” Well it so happens that I came to a few epiphanies while I was in the shower one day… literally; and so, with a few friends of mine, we started building. Within weeks, we were able to put out a minimum viable product to a number of friends and family and then, based on feedback, we pushed an updated more thought through MVP to the iPhone app store. The new project is called Bittr.ly; a platform that empowers consumers to vent to companies in the form of [hopefully] constructive suggestions. I would not have been able to put an app out there had I not reflected on where I went wrong with MGB.
A few things I learned from failing on MGB
- Get something in user’s hands ASAP and most importantly listen to what they like and don’t like (make sure you look at the wrong answers on a test and are able to correct your mistakes)
- I suck at visual design. I decided not to do it and asked a friend to help me this time.
- Look at metrics consistently. A friend pushed bittr.ly on Stumble Upon. What did that do for my site traffic? What did that do for app downloads? How many posts do we have?I look at this stuff constantly and though I don’t have google analytics up 24/7 hitting the refresh button, I do obsess over it. This stuff matters.
- Don’t be afraid of pushing the button. As we were re-working a few things to get ready to push the app to the app store, I found myself hesitant to push the button. I kept saying “I could fix this, and I can build that”. Finally, I reallized that I have no data behind a decision to fix this and build that, instead I was about to head down the same path as I did with MGB. That’s when we submitted the app!
Great, did you succeed?
Heck no! Not yet anyway. App downloads are low, though posts per user for the users we do have are very promising. We have tons of work to do still, but we are much further along in a few months than we ever were with MGB. This is only incentive to keep moving, and keep failing… fast.
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