The Best Entrepreneurs Know How To Fail Fast | Hacker News Reader

The Best Entrepreneurs Know How To Fail Fast

feld.com

41 pointspeter12315 comments

I'm highly anticipating a 37Signals blog post titled "The Best Entrepreneurs Know How to Succeed Slowly."

To be fair, they only came out with that post after the virtue of failing had been basically become received wisdom.

I'm still not sure what it means -- I hope it's fairly synonymous with "fail cheaply", or to me at least it's useless advice.

It means validate your idea quickly against real customers and do something else if they don't love it. Once you determine to do this, you find that many ideas you thought were great are total shite, so you fail fast because you don't do much development without validation. You are able to iterate through multiple concepts quickly until you arrive at one people love, and then you throw yourself behind it and get it built and get people paying.

The common mistake is to pick an idea out of your head, spend six months building it, and then find out nobody is willing to pay for that thing over the next six months after that.

Thats what fail fast means. Its the key to success.

I read the whole thing, but you lost credibility at the first sentence. It's a proven myth that a failing at a start-up is no indicator of success at your next start-up.

The only "predictor" of future success in any world is past success. Give me a successful person with any reasonable background, and I'd prefer them to a failure as the leader of a company.

As Professor Paul Gompers says, “for the average entrepreneur who failed, no learning happened.” http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/5941.html

I would suggest that failing at a startup and demonstrating that you've learned from that failure would be a strong indicator of success. There's so many common lessons people learn.

Before just repeating the fallacy, why don't you read the HBR link I posted. As it turns out, what you say is just not true, when actually measured.

On what basis would you suggest otherwise? Anecdotal evidence from a bunch of failed entrepreneurs who want to believe the experience helped them?

I didn't repeat the fallacy, I characterized his talk. He's explaning that he learned an awful lot about metrics.

Failing is one thing, demonstrating that you've learned is another.

Would you take a person with no experience in startups (and hence no failures) over person who failed a startup?

The best entrepreneurs know to not waste time reading this garbage and work on their startup instead.

To be fair, keeping up to date with information and learning new things is a must for a entrepreneurship. You really cannot decide if it's garbage before reading it.

But on a side note, I think web related entrepreneurs should definitely stop wasting time Tweeting and Blogging about their development, and instead actually do development.

I hate this "fail fast" advice, and just about the only place I've heard it is from VCs, who (a) don't like slow success, and (b) don't mind failure as long as it is balanced with successes in their portfolio.

The problem with the advice is that it obscures two of the most important qualities that a startup needs: tenacity and adaptability.

Not fail fast, but more like know how to retool what you have into another business.

A friend of mine became a hugely successful used-laptop vendor because he learned the ropes of the industry while trying to liquidate the equipment of his failed business (he only had 20 laptops to sell and found the low prices buyers were offering for bulk used laptops vs the high street retail price for single units.)

If my current start up doesn't pan out, I have about 5 different business automation solutions I can take to the market .. or maybe even when it's successful ;-)

Well, it really should be "The Best Entrepreneurs Know How To Learn From Their Failures"

How about "The Best Entrepreneurs Don't Fail"

So, he does raise a great point about being obsessed with metrics. This is key to building and running any stable business. Love your numbers.

I think good product people are combination of:

1. obsessed with metrics

2. knowing what to measure

3. using these two things and their knowledge of their market to know what to make

I don't think just trusting your numbers and obsessive A/B testing is enough. It definitely helps though.

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