Try. Fail. Learn. Repeat! And don’t forget to laugh about?it.

You often read about successful people saying that they experienced lots of failures just to be successful in the long-run. But what kind of failures did they experience and what did they learn from it? To make it more tangible for my team and other founders that want to build something, I wrote a couple of my failures down. I failed, over and over again. Here are four of my biggest failures and the learnings I took from them. Have fun!

No.1: The market is huge!

The year before kartenmacherei, I built a company for baby textiles because my wife and I loved it. It was so awesome since we were the only place where you could design your baby patchwork blanket with your preferred fabrics. We thought that if we loved it, lots of other people will love it as well. The products were great. Our kids still love them, but the problem was that it was not scalable at all. Every piece was a unique piece. Thus it was really expensive and people didn’t buy it. So we went live and realized after a year, that it wouldn’t work out. On top of it, I didn’t stop it early enough, despite knowing that it wouldn’t scale. I loved the idea, the products and couldn’t let go and still am thinking about relaunching it at some point in time in the future. The hard learning was that you should have a hypothesis and test them early on before you go all-in. If it doesn’t work out, accept it and move on or pivot. 

No.2: Really, I don’t need a developer!

In the early days of kartenmacherei it was just me and a freelance developer working on the online shop. On a Saturday morning, I was looking to change something in our shop backend. It is a Magento shop and I pressed a button for opening a new shop. I wanted to test something before I apply it to the actual shop. Nothing big, but I didn’t want to wait for our freelance developer. I thought I could do it by myself. I didn’t expect anything to happen. But then the complete shop went offline. Why? We used an extension for our Magento shop that had only a license for one shop. So in the moment I “opened” a new shop, that license was deactivated and that killed the shop. I needed a day to first reach our freelance developer who then repaired our shop. You can imagine me running nuts at home, jumping around and yelling at myself “how stupid I could be”. I really took an uncalculated risk and learned that Magento is tricky. Just clicking on or changing something might end up in killing the shop. So, from that day on, I always consulted our developers beforehand if I wanted to change or test something I didn’t do before. Depending on the inherent risk — which is sometimes hard to estimate if you are not the expert — you should definitely consult experts or more experienced people before you do something the first time — not only to reduce risk but even more to improve outcome.

No.3: We just change the domain. All will be good!

Don’t ask me why, but when we went live with kartenmacherei we decided to go for the .com domain only to learn from our first SEO agency, that .com doesn’t perform as well as .de at Google in Germany with regards to click-through rates. So we decided after being almost two years live to move the whole domain from .com to .de. We thought we had everything well planned. Most of it was. We just forgot about one thing. At that time Google had just introduced stars for seller reviews in the search ads and we were one of the few companies having a lot of them and with 4.9 out of 5.0 the best result. What we forgot was that these reviews were bound to the .com domain. Thus we had no stars after switching and our paid click-through rate decreased heavily. It took Google almost two months to move reviews from the .com to the .de domain at that time. To avoid losing traffic and paying more per click, we left the old page .com for the SEA landing pages and funneled them with the first click to the .de page. Any tech-affine person can imagine that doing this was a really hot ride. It was a dirty hack, but for us the risk of losing Google SEO results was smaller than losing SEA traffic. It was one of the worst moments for us at that time, waking up to the reality that we almost killed our business model and profitability. What I learned is that even if big shit happens, if you stay calm but also put all your effort into finding a solution, chances are good you can do so and find one. Maybe that really drove my mentality to never give up finding a better solution, even if I feel completely helpless in the first place.

No.4: The world is waiting for us. Believe me!

After 4 years at kartenmacherei, we went into the Netherlands and completely misanalyzed the market just to shut down our operations after being online for a couple of months. Did we do market research? Of course. Did we miss the deciding details? Absolutely. We went into the Netherlands after having rebuilt and translated our shop and products for about a year. We analyzed search phrases at Google and our competitors. We thought it was an awesome market since lots of people were searching for comparable keywords. What did we find out when we started? Conversion rates were at roughly 1/10 of our German ones. Why? While the keywords were the same the product wasn’t. In Germany, birth announcements (“Geburtskarten”) are not the same as in the Netherlands (“geboortekaartjes”). In Germany, it is a thank you card sent roughly 3–4 months after birth with lots of pictures of the baby while in the Netherlands it is rather an announcement card sent within the first 2–3 days without any pictures. You can imagine the product to be completely different. For us it would have meant rebuilding our complete product portfolio just for the Netherlands. In that moment the very attractive market became suddenly really unattractive. Thus, we decided that it wasn’t worth the effort. So we stopped our activities only a couple of months after going live. Key learning to me is to test and experiment with customers before you invest too much since you likely never see all the details in the first place. But these details can make a huge difference. Even though one could have anticipated that difference between NL and DE earlier.

Key takeaways

In the past, I was not good at all in getting along with my failures. I got angry, started yelling at myself. After a couple of hours or a night of sleep, I usually took the challenge, worked even harder, stressed my mind, talked to experts and tried to fix it as soon as possible. With every failure, I more and more understood that stopping there is no option. So once something shitty happens, take responsibility, reflect and learn and try another solution — with all you have.

“You can’t let your failures define you. You have to let your failures teach you.” (Barack Obama)

Today, I try to understand inherent risks to a decision and ask my team to do that as well. We experiment with remaining risks in a smaller scope so that the impact of a failure is smaller. For example, when we relaunched our shop last year, the biggest risk was to lose significant organic rankings at Google. To reduce our risks, we first tested the waters by launching in a small country and analyzed any problems that came up. Somewhat expected, the organic rankings plummeted. We learned and adjusted and tried again in another small country. Only after we fixed all problems that occurred, we launched in the largest country. And it worked out.

“Anyone who has never made a mistake, has never tried anything new.” (Albert Einstein)

So to me, following the quote from Albert Einstein is important. Still, I prefer reducing the risk and impact of failure as much as possible. Most importantly — especially as a leader — we need to open up, speak about our failures and share and discuss our learnings. Thus we can help to avoid that other people do the same failures. In this sense, what are your biggest failures? Are you brave enough to share them and speak openly about them? And don’t take yourself too seriously. The first time I shared the above-mentioned failures in my team, we laughed about it. And that actually felt really good.

Want to read more about our journey? Have a look at the other articles I wrote on medium or have a look at our company website.