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5 Comments

What is the fastest way you've failed?

I have a dream of starting my own business but I know that I'll likely fail given I don't know a lot - so I wanna see what kind of failures are good easy 'wins' aka failures that you might have experienced in your journey.

  1. 3

    The fastest way to fail is to never begin in the first place. You have a business idea, but you are too afraid to put it into practice.

    1. 1

      This comment was deleted a year ago.

  2. 2

    I had an idea to do a hosted GraphQL proxy that could productionize any GraphQL server -- basically, turn any GraphQL server into a secure GraphQL server by going through the proxy.

    But then I chatted with a bunch of people over the course of a month, and eventually came to the conclusion that people don't really get excited about raw technologies (like GraphQL), they get excited about the libraries or apps on top of them (Apollo, Hasura, etc) and they just happen to be implemented in GraphQL. So I didn't see a good entry into this already-crowded market without finding a way to generate hype for whatever I was building.

  3. 2

    The best lesson I've ever learned is to talk to customers, and when they say it's a good idea, get a letter of intent (or better, a pre-purchase). It's tough to tell people you don't like their idea or what they're working on, but it's easy to say I don't want to pay for it (or promise you'll pay for it). You'll get really actionable feedback if you ask for money.

  4. 2

    The best way to fail is when you start by asking potential customers about your ideas - check the MomTest to ask the good question, and you finally discover that your idea sucks.
    That's failing without even starting for real!

    In general, if you want the failure to be less painful try to get as much feedback as you can and on a super regular basis. Don't spend several weeks building without talking with your customers!

  5. 1

    As someone here pointed out, ideally you fail before you start working on the product itself by asking the right questions (Mom test) and validating, nothing worse then working on something for a year to figure out nobody wants it but trust me it happens more often than you think. (To me too 😳)

    Also if you start the business for starting a business sake I think you're gonna be in for a bad time as well, it's much more stuff you don't want to deal with then the stuff you do want to deal with but if you're doing it for the right reasons it's nonetheless worth it at the end of the day.

  6. 1

    This comment was deleted 3 years ago.

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