Exposing Myself To Failure | Hacker News Reader

Exposing Myself To Failure

mrmilksblog.tumblr.com

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We need to teach the highly educated man that it is not a disgrace to fail and that he must analyze every failure to find its cause. -- Charles Kettering

When hacking tech, this kind of failure analysis happens all the time. In fact, it's not even recognized as failure; it's all flow, most of the time anyway.

When going into business, when I build and they don't come -- that's different, right? Social rejection. A slap in the face. YOW!

Nothing to analyze.

Or is there?

Sometimes, a product launch fails because of a lack of awareness of how people actually buy things:

In [1], we read "The typical potential customer is full of doubt:

* They’re unsure if they want what you’re selling.

* They’re unsure how it would help them.

* They’re unsure if they should trust you, if you’ll deliver.

* They’re unsure if the price is reasonable.

* They’re unsure if they should buy now or wait til later, when the need seems more pressing, or when they remember it again."

Faced with this reality, what hacks are possible?

[1] http://unicornfree.com/2013/3-critical-non-obvious-ingredien...

I found out recently that this doesn't apply only to business ventures, but also personal projects. Free and open-source yet no one will find them unless I do the extra legwork.

I built a visual remote designer for the mobile app Unified Remote because I felt remotes should be designed visually rather than with XML (I also wanted to play with using KnockoutJS to generate XML.) No one seemed to care until I posted to the company's Facebook wall. I also emailed the company to let them know and they've since recommended it to people having trouble understanding the XML. I'm also telling you guys :) http://remote-creator.appspot.com

You have to put it out everywhere you can if you want it to succeed. I tried posting my Chrome extension for injecting reviews for doctors into insurance company pages on here and it immediately dropped out of site. It's more universally useful than my other projects: http://github.com/csmatt/doctorratings .

Don't give up!

The Now Habit, the book that was suggested with that "Procrastination is not Laziness" post last week goes very into depth about de-coupling one's self-worth and one's fear of rejection and criticism. I've started to read it, and I think that I can recommend it to anyone who's anxious about how they or how something they've made will be responded to.

Thanks for the book recommendation. I went to buy it off of Amazon and got a reminder of just how screwed up the book publishing market is screwed up. The electronic version is almost $3.00 (22%) more than the paperback.

I haven't read the Now Habit yet, but another great read along those lines is The Antidote.

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