The mantra “Fail Fast, Fail Often” is wrong!!
A Startup Vitamin: “It’s better to fail at doing the right thing than to succeed at doing the wrong thing”
Failure can take many forms, it could be the simple choice of a wrong business model, it could be an of the beam hire, it could be the adoption of an unrealistic company policy, the choice of an incompatible co-founder or even the basic idea that you wanted to start this business. So the “Fail Fast” mantra cannot be applied to all of these. Let me break the ice for you.
“Failure is an option here, if things are not failing, you are not innovating enough” - Elon Musk
Fearing “failure” stifles creativity and progress. If you’re not failing, you’re not going to innovate. Do your product or service a favor: by embracing failure and blueprint a plan that affords you the opportunity to do it early and with minimum loss.
Let me start with a small story, consider a baby who started to take his first steps to learn walking and he keeps falling down often in the initial stages, but if the same baby doesn’t get up and try again then can we conclude that the baby has failed and has accepted that he can never walk, of course not! In this scenario, the number of times the baby fails is considered as the learning steps and every time the baby attempts to walk again this tells us that he is going to succeed. Implied theory here “Fail Early, Fail Fast and Succeed Faster”.
“You don’t learn to walk by following rules. You learn by doing and falling over” - Richard Branson
Before any startup emerges, loads of market research is done, best friends become co-founders, they stir up all these researched mixtures to build mastermind business plans and then investments are pitched in day and night with the so called required projections/presentations and even after all these awesome efforts if the startup is just not able to hit the ground with the product or service, then should the startup accept this as a failure and shut down their business? Of course not! Failure has nothing to do with these kind of a scenarios, the sooner these stumbling startups learn from their mistakes and try to restructure their plans and change for the better then they can grab the success they dreamt of. Success will knock at their doorstep eventually! There are some real-time startup companies which took more than 10 years to become popular or to even hit the ground with their product. Like I mentioned in my third article, if the co-founders don’t get along well and often quarrel over petty issues, can the quarrelsome founder just be replaced with any available options, No, this will only create more chaos in the company and will lead to the same issues, hence this also cannot be counted as a failure, instead they need to sort out the differences and move forward as a team for the betterment of the company. These are not to be considered as failures, these mistakes cannot be rectified overnight instead have to be accepted.
“Failure is good but fail fast, fail with minimum impact and learn from your mistakes” - David Tattum
Whereas when we talk about “Fail fast, Fail often” mantra it’s for the smaller mistakes, like re-strategizing a business model to make it cost effective, redesigning the existing product/service to make it better for the consumers, or even rehiring new members for the team if we haven’t found the right ones initially, retesting the software to eliminate the bugs before the launch etc., failure can be accepted in anyone of these cases and yes it should be accepted earlier so that we can arrive at feasible solutions. Hence the saying proves true for these scenarios “Test Fast, Fail Fast and Adjust Faster”
See you soon!!
Just remember guys, “Failure is the mother of all Success”
Kind regards,
Kavya Rao Addepalli