About a year ago, during a speech I was giving for a Hacker News group, someone in the audience brought up the notion that “Failure Is Good”, i.e. Fail Fast, Fail Often. This is a major change in thinking from the past, due to many factors, and it makes a lot of sense. Rapid prototyping of web apps and mobile apps now means rapid prototyping of startups.
Since everything in life is becoming an app and MVP is good enough to actually attract revenue and/or funding, you can actually try something and throw it away within a few weeks. The cost for this is from $0 to $5,ooo.
The problem is when someone tries this over and over with the same result – junking it. I see a lot of this in my circles There is a price for doing this; you wer yourself out, lose credibility, waste peoples money and time, lose friends, etc.
A better option is to vastly improve your odds each time by getting smarter, refining, capitalizing on mistakes, getting help in the areas where you’re weak, have less ego and more focus on not accepting failure.
If you add up all the attempts to launch startups over the past 2-3 years by all participants, there are probably at least a million failures. Many of these were stepping stones to better things and/or a quite valuable learning process, maturity, personal growth. But over half were probably unnecessary ego bursts and fleeting ideas where deep down inside the founder knows it ain’t gonna happen but keeps going for many reasons.
Most people are very good at one thing at a time, not five so pick ONE and try that role and let as many others as possible help prevent failure number one million and one. @tomnora