Start Up: Succeed by Failing

Start-Up! is weekly column on entrepreneurship, start-ups, technology and innovation, powered by the Adams Hub for Innovation.

Failure gets a bad rap.

The fear of failing stops many people from pursuing what could be amazingly successful opportunities. After all, who likes to fail? When you are talking about a business, failure can be a humiliating experience, as well as costly.

But if you are afraid to fail, you will never succeed.

We really need to change the way we look at failure.

Have you ever heard of the Detroit Automobile Company? Probably not, because it went bankrupt in 1901. But you probably know its founder, Henry Ford. His second car company also failed. Even after going bust twice, Ford managed to attract enough investor dollars to get the Ford Motor Company off the ground.

Walt Disney was fired from his job as a newspaper cartoonist because he “lacked imagination and had no good ideas.” Imagine if he had quit after that failure?

Twitter started out as a side project that founders Evan Williams and Jack Dorsey began working on when their podcasting company Odeo stalled.

Successful entrepreneurs learn from their mistakes. Very rarely does someone’s original business idea become successful. It’s only after that idea is exposed to others do you find out if it works or not.

In Silicon Valley these days, there is a mantra for would-be entrepreneurs looking to make it big: Fail fast.

What does it mean to fail fast? It means that entrepreneurs should expect to fail at their first try, and therefore should plan to do it fast and cheap. The successful entrepreneur starts with a quick, cheap prototype of his or her idea and tests it with potential customers.

For instance, back in the spring of 2010, Akshay Kothari and Ankit Gupta had an idea for a news reader app named Pulse that would work on the newly launched iPad. These two Stanford University students spent their spare time in the numerous coffee shops in the area talking to people and showing them crude prototypes of their app, sometimes just hand drawn on a sheet of paper.

“In some ways, if you're not committing mistakes, then you're not trying that hard,” Kothari said. “We wanted to try to push the boundary a little bit and take bold steps. Along the way, we made our fair share of mistakes in terms of interaction or something we thought would be an interesting feature but ended up not being one. In the culture of our company is the idea that instead of developing the ideas in your head and building it, let the consumer vote. If we end up making a mistake, we are quick to rectify it.”

All that work paid off three years later, when Pulse was acquired by LinkedIn for a reported $90 million.

Whatever idea you might have for a business, figure out the fastest, cheapest way to test it in front of real customers. This is what is referred to as the Minimum Viable Product, or MVP. Find a way to create a MVP of your idea, before you invest serious time and money.

One of the most popular businesses people start is a restaurant. Restaurants also have a very high rate of going out of business. The biggest reason new restaurants go belly up is that the would-be restauranteurs don’t know how to fail fast and cheap.

So imagine we have two would-be restauranteurs. The first one starts out with an idea, then goes out and leases a restaurant space and buys the equipment needed to get started.

The second would-be restauranteur starts off by offering to cater some local events for cheap, to see what total strangers have to say about the food. Instead of buying equipment, she rents space in a commercial kitchen for cheap to prepare the food for the catered events. Then she diligently collects the feedback and makes adjustments. And only after all this does she jump in and set up an actual restaurant.

Now imagine you were given the choice to invest your money in one of these two restaurants. Which would you choose?

If you have an idea for a business, embrace failure and figure out how to fail fast and cheap. This is your best road to success.

Kirk Caraway is the founder of Carson Now, and a Premier Partner with the Adams Hub for Innovation.