The Five Stages of Screwing Up Repeat after us: It'll be ok.

MediaRadar had been growing at a steady clip and was about to launch a big new product. This was 2010, and the then-4-year-old company, which helps clients like The New York Times target advertisers, had created a tool to identify media buyers. "But instead of us taking a year to build it from scratch, we paid a third party that specializes in providing this exact data," says CEO Todd Krizelman. It seemed like the right move at the time. But then the bad news started rolling in…

Stage 1: Denial

Almost immediately after MediaRadar announced the product, clients were queuing up to use it. But before the week was out, a handful had called to report major errors. "I thought maybe it was just a few bits of bad data," Krizelman says. "But as we signed up more clients, we were compounding the problem." Complaints trickled in.