Failure is part of startups

Issue 24 — You need this superpower

This week's main topic is "How to think about failure."

What you'll read this week

• Failure is part of startups
• Weekly Bootstrapping Update

Enjoy!

---

Failure is part of Startups

I’m working on a physical goods business.

I haven’t talked about it much, but I will share more with you in the future.

Today, I want to share my weekend's progress with you and how it relates to all startups, whether they’re software or physical goods.

I went 0 for 4.

That’s how many tasks went as planned and were finished this weekend.

All four tasks failed.

I didn’t really accomplish anything this weekend.

But I still made progress.

There’s progress in failure

It can be discouraging trying to bring a vision to life.

It can feel lonely in a world that often doesn’t celebrate grind.

Instead of being (overly) frustrated with the lack of success this weekend, I reassessed what I did accomplish.

Yes, all four projects are incomplete. And I’m still scratching my head about what went wrong with two of them. But I did accomplish things:

• One failure made me discover that a prototype should be done slightly differently, resulting in a more refined look and feel.
• Two failures for two different projects ended in the same weird error on my CNC. Showing me that I have a gap in my knowledge. That’s good to know. People go throughout their entire lives, never realizing they have any gaps. 😅
• And the last one showed me I should approach prototyping with more small experimentation first. I’d have saved a lot of time.

So, in reality, I had a learning-filled weekend. That’s success.

And really, that’s how you handle failure. You frame it. I chose to frame failure as learning. I ask myself why something failed a few times and then move on.

---

Weekly Bootstrapping Update

Email subscribers get a behind the scenes updates on the two SaaS my co-founder and I are creating.