Tomorrow is Another Day

For those of you who read classics, you would know these words from Scarlett o’ Hara from Gone with the Wind. One of the books I devoured as a teenager but like most, I didn’t swoon over Rhett Butler, I was just impressed by the grit of Scarlett who kept coming back no matter what life threw at her. In such places, people quote Edison and Roosevelt when it comes to failure but I draw my inspiration from the heroines like Scarlett or Jo from Little Women. The reason I bring these up is over the last six months as I build VAll, I fall more than I succeed like these strong women I read as a child.

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It can be the technology platform/ website that took three more months to build and continues to give errors. For the last couple of weeks we had the dreaded 500 error when we introduced the location feature. Can’t replicate the issue in test mode so my errors only show up when my real users want to use them. What can I do? Take it off, apologise to the user, and keep testing in the back. Gives me nightmares to think of that dreaded black reason, almost reminds me of the blue screen of death in Windows from my coding days.

Or it can be the schools or colleges that said a yes emphatically when you met them initially and now don’t respond to your messages. It’s difficult when this happens because you find a contact, sometimes you mess up, sometimes they choose to ghost you (not respond to messages or calls) and sometimes they are just too busy and you are not as important to them. Have gone through all of it. The first school I met, I didn’t send my pre-reads to the principal. She was excited by the idea at that point but never got back to me. I kept trying but unfortunately one of those cases where I failed miserably. Just had to brush my shoulders and go to another meeting the next day which luckily wasn’t as bad.

Or it can be NGOs that are excited to work with you and take forever to sign up, not respond after they talk about a partnership, or just do not find value currently in what you are proposing. Not much I can do besides keep emailing and sending reminders and hope they come through.

For every yes I get from an NGO, school/ college, I get a No or wait time from ten others. We try the warm connects, the cold emails, the LinkedIn and Instagram stalking, we try it all to see what works and what doesn’t. Slowly we are working to eliminate what doesn’t work but these are expensive mistakes in terms of time and money. One would say, just brush your shoulders and try again but it is not easy. It is not easy for me and it is not easy for the team. While we are in the pilot stage, we are still gunning to get the targets we set for ourselves since the product is out in the market.

Events on VAll

I have seen enough failure in the past so this is not the first time. I was a klutzy athlete, coder, and fundraiser so there are more falls, errors, and NOs in these areas but it hurts a little more when it is your own.

I am sure every entrepreneur has struggled with failure where they thought something would happen for sure and nothing did. I have seen it over and over in the last six months from a basic thing of registering my company name to now getting people to sign up for events and create new ones. The things that my therapist told me worked for self-care and now work for business too somewhere

1. Did I learn something from the failure? If I didn’t then I need to re-evaluate it, look harder, and understand what I did wrong. Doesn’t always have to be my mistake but it is always nice to know what went wrong and how should I approach it the next time.
2. Am I making progress? Am I facing the same issues or are they different each time? This is important because while you are failing if you are moving ahead then you should be ok. Like with VAll, we struggled in December and January to have NGOs join the platform and now we have a new one every other week. Or in February we struggled to even have friends create events and then we had some in March and by the end of the month, we had externals create events too. Now we are struggling with sign-ups. Small wins but my failure points are changing each time so I just keep course correcting till I find the right ones.
3. Keep trying, don’t give up easily. The grit of maintaining the course will help you succeed. I am maintaining crazy Google sheets and documents of everything we are doing and everyone we are interacting with and I keep updating it as I try. It’s a test of patience but I learnt it the hard way in my first job in the non-profit world when I came back to India. I had to email my boss innumerable times before I got an interview with him. It is never easy for the good things so need to keep trying.
4. Know when to walk away. Some cases are just not worth it and I need to learn when to give up instead of banging my head against the wall. It is not easy but need to say, no more and leave it unfinished. Somewhat like those books you carry with you for life with bookmarks in between or those boyfriends, you should have broken up with ages ago.

While I say all of this, I will acknowledge, each of these failures hurt and I sometimes lie on the couch or bed and watch rubbish television for hours to get over it. I do get out of the funk sooner or later and tell myself like Scarlett, “Tomorrow is another day”, let us see how I can do things differently.

#Failure #startups #startupfounder #grit #tomorrow #vallindia