Failing doesn’t always mean death, complete destruction, or that it’s all over for your startup or product. Pardon the dramatics but allow me to elaborate.
I’m pretty sure you’ve heard people in the startup space wax lyrical about failing or failing fast - just failure in general.
To get a bit of a background on me, we launched Unubo some time ago and documented the launch right here on Indie Hackers.
It all went well, with plenty of people signing up who are still using our product today.
However, we went back and forth on pricing, starting with cheap, to free, then slightly more expensive, then free again. It was a mess and customers were as confused as we were - fail!
In a conversation someone challenged us with the following scenario: ‘OK, so what you’re building is a cool feature, but what if a couple of college kids hacked this together over one weekend, who have a better network than you?’.
That had us stumped as we never thought about it. All we had was tunnel vision and started to realise, that we didn’t have a product that’s truly defensible.
In validation to what she had challenged us with, we soon started noticing a lot of competition, with people developing similar or the same product to ours.
We didn’t differentiate enough to truly stand out. The market started getting very crowded and sign ups stalled - fail!
Of course we could have kept pushing on, do it for the long haul, but my gut feeling was to change direction - so we did.
We went from building a tool to help you manage what you spend on subscriptions, to something like J.A.R.V.I.S. (from Iron Man) for businesses - talk about pivoting.
There were many more fails and bumps in the road along the way, but every one of those bumps were necessary, for us to get to where we are now.
Failure can be a scary word, but as you see, it can often just mean a change in direction.
The faster you can recognise that things aren’t working and adapt accordingly, the better you’ll fair. Make it your superpower!
Who knows, it might result in a much better version of your product.