You will fail | Hacker News Reader

You will fail

whattofix.com

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.

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 :)

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.

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

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.

Hence "Fail early, fail often" and "try to fail as quickly as possible". Both of which I've seen repeatably from commenters here.

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.

Perseverance is an awesome trait, and real tenacity is a rarity in this instant gratification world. I deeply admire those who just keep at it despite incredible hardship. However, there are at least a couple of things I can think of that people need to be cautious about.

1) Not every venture has the possibility of a profitiable outcome. There is real wisdom in knowing when and how to get out and do something else. Often you can change the gameplan on the same venture, but sometimes it isn't possible. It is possible to waste your time trying to ride a dead horse.

2) Entrepeneurs often don't like to hear it, but there is more to life than work. It is possible to spend too much time and energy on your business. There is a long line of middle-aged (and older) men and women with kids that won't talk to them, spouses who divorced them, friends who wonder whatever happened to them (and even worse situations that I won't enumerate) all because they were so focused on never giving up on their business that they sacrificed their personal lives to try to "make it happen". Be tenacious, be determined, but be in control of your business life -- don't let it control you.

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.

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

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.

I agree. Every rational person realizes failure is possible. The most motivated acknowledge that at the outset, when setting up partner terms and agreements, and never consider it an option again until failure is real.

That said, I also think there is an important differentiation between focusing on failure and realizing when its time to cut away from a bad project/idea/concept and adapt. Adapting from incremental failures is critical to success.

> Adapting from incremental failures is critical to success.

That's an absolute gem. Because that is exactly how it goes. My luck was to be involved in two companies that simply paid me a wage, they had a reasonably good idea at the time, they were good enough in their execution, one was 10 years ahead of its time (the idea has since been adopted and is now common practice), the other failed because of terrible planning and marketing.

My gain was as much or more looking from the position of a salaried employee and to learn as much as if it was my own company that failed.

If it hadn't been for those two projects I wouldn't have stood a chance in hell with my own business, even today I benefit from that experience.

The most important thing you can do if your project tanks is to really sit down and mine it for what its worth with respect to the lessons that you can learn from it. Then it's time well spent, otherwise it is wasted and you will likely make the same mistake(s) again.

Especially in a world that is moving so fast that during the lifetime of a single individual no single strategy will continue to work this is absolutely essential.

The days when you could invent a gadget and live your life long on the proceeds are pretty much gone, you are most likely not going to see many people be handed out golden watches for 50 years dedicated service to 'the company' in the future.

And that will only get worse, as product life cycles shorten and new inventions build on previous ones at an ever accelerating pace.

I call that the startup advice contradiction: http://blog.fairsoftware.net/2009/12/18/startup-advice-contr...

How can you both fail fast and be resilient? Isn't giving both advice the same as hedging a bet? Then you can say "I told you so", no matter what happens...

I think if you view being a successful startup as some simple set of teachable attributes, like "founders and businesses that refuse to fail eventually succeed", then you are living in a fantasy world. Let's assume for a moment that there aren't a zillion different "how to succeed in startup" books. Let's say there are a 100 things you must do to succeed.

So you do all of them. Odd are you will still fail. That is, odds are that whatever you set out to do will not be successful.

I think perhaps we are playing semantics games. If you start with a good team and pivot repeatedly, always adjusting your business model to find and target the customer, and then never giving up? Then you've done exactly what I recommend -- failing a lot repeatedly (and quickly) You probably can fail a lot better with a good team iterating quickly than you can forming a new team each time, or giving it one 4-year shot every decade or so.

If, on the other hand, you view gaining skills and pieces of knowledge as incremental rather than pivotal factors, and you understand that the odds are naturally against anybody, then it becomes a zen thing, just like sales. Just like sales, you adjust your attitude, you screw down your courage, and you go give it all you've got. Just like sales, success comes from within and not without. Just like sales, you do the best, right thing everyday but you're looking at the long haul for value.

Some folks think successful startups are just luck. They are partially right and partially wrong. Some folks think successful startups are like a science, something you can learn and perform repeatedly. They also are partially right and partially wrong.

The only real answer is that success has to come from inside of you long before it appears on a balance sheet. That you create your own value by acting in accordance with your values. From there success will naturally follow.

If that sounds too mushy I apologize. I just hear people in such pain about how screwed up it all is, and I wish somebody would sit down and explain to them some of this stuff.

I'm probably just struggling to disagree at this point. :-) On the other hand, there's already a lot of information "out there"; I spent years considering the idea of starting and running a business before doing it. Other people don't. To each their own.

If your post was intended to be about iteration, I didn't get that from it. I read "failure" -- especially since the post linked to the whole sordid affair over fundable.com, which has failed in pretty much every sense of the word -- to imply the demise of the company (and the demoralisation of the founder[s]).

For failing quickly -- and iterating, and hopefully learning from the failures -- there are numerous proverbs from Go [1] (the game, not the neophyte language). I also recall reading a very good essay recently, something along the lines of "fail as quickly as possible", but can't find it now.

So, the advice is already out there, for those that would heed it anyway.

[1]: e.g. http://senseis.xmp.net/?LoseYourFirst50GamesAsQuicklyAsPossi...

Disagreeing is good :) That's the benefit of the blog+HN approach. You can write an article and then do Q&A in a public forum. It is the best of both worlds. Hopefully by disagreeing we'll explain what we're talking about more.

I remember reading Founders At Work. One of the points that one of the founders made was "don't try to read too many business books" His point, I think, was that it was really easy to fill your head with lots of great ideas. And executing was more important than all of them.

There was a saying I heard once: work on sales and all your other problems will take care of themselves. It doesn't mean that other things aren't important, just that there are some key metrics for any business.

I've spent a lot of time reading a lot of books (and HN) about startups. I think finally it's all congealed with me -- I got it. Perhaps I am sadly disillusioned, but I don't scratch my head like I used to any more. When I read an article like the one I read today, I don't think "What kind of idiots wouldn't invest in such a cool idea?" Instead I think "Wonder why the community has failed this person such that he expects something much different than what he got?"

I'm done commenting, though. We've probably beaten this horse to death by now :-)

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!

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.

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.

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!

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.

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

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