Your First Product May Not Succeed. Here's Why Giving Up Is a Mistake. Nobody likes to fail, but I'd argue there's value in not hitting it big on your first try.
By Aytekin Tank Edited by Kara McIntyre
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
Have you ever heard of Odeo? NeXt? How about Traf-O-Data?
If you follow startup news, you may be familiar with these failed attempts by founders who went on to become household names — Evan Williams, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates started the aforementioned businesses before they launched Twitter, Apple and Microsoft.
Few of us would consider these examples of unsuccessful entrepreneurs. If you could ask them, they'd probably tell you that those early attempts were instrumental in paving the way for their later achievements.
Nobody likes to fail. But I'd argue that there's value in not hitting it big on your first try. Here's why.
Related: A Good Product Is Not the Same as a Successful Business — Here's How to Turn One Into the Other
You learn adaptability
A failed product is not the sign of a failed entrepreneur. There are so many reasons why an idea, no matter how promising it seems from the outset, doesn't work out.
Personally, I created four or five different products before I landed on Jotform. It's not that these previous products didn't sell — they did. The problem was that, for various reasons, they were unsustainable. Learning to let go was hard at first, but here's the thing: Being an entrepreneur is more than coming up with a great idea. It's about understanding your customers and the market.
To return to an example from above, Odeo was a podcasting platform launched by Evan Williams in 2005 that was killed off in short order when Apple released iTunes. It must have been a heavy blow, and Williams could have easily thrown in the towel, convinced he'd never come up with another comparably good concept. Instead, he performed one of the most storied pivots in startup history, shifting Odeo's focus from podcasting to the social media platform, Twitter (now X).
It's hard not to get too attached to an idea, especially when you've invested time, energy and money into making it work. But that attachment ultimately affects your judgment. As the entrepreneur Paul Graham once noted, "You haven't really started working on [your idea] till you've launched."
Instead of clinging to a sinking ship, I prefer to adhere to the advice of James Clear: Identify your non-negotiable. Allow all your previous ideas to fall away — rework them, pivot them, abandon them completely — except that non-negotiable. Knowing what to let go of and when is an essential part of not just building a business but keeping it afloat.
Related: 3 Essential Skills I Learned By Growing My Business From the Ground Up
You learn valuable lessons (if you keep going)
If failure is the best teacher, many entrepreneurs are getting an excellent education: Research conducted between 1994 and 2020 found that 68% of new establishments survived at least two years; after five years, the survival rate drops to under 50%.
Those are long odds. But those who give up after the first failure have wasted the opportunity to apply some valuable lessons learned. Looking back, my own setbacks can be grouped into one of two categories: 1) Productive failures, which have taught me important lessons (and contributed to future success), and 2) Unnecessary failures, avoidable situations that wouldn't have happened with better planning and research.
While the latter category still makes me cringe, the former has been essential. That doesn't mean accepting those failures is easy: Writing for Harvard Business Review, Art Papas notes that failure is only helpful if you're able to keep it from destroying your self-confidence and try again. The process of picking yourself up after a crushing blow can look a lot like denial — and that's okay. "Once you've failed as an entrepreneur, you need to have blind confidence and a healthy sense of aggression to prove to people that you actually can succeed," Papas explains. "If at first you don't succeed, you're in for the fight of your life."
These are harsh words, but they're true. A failed business is not for the faint of heart — but neither is entrepreneurship. That's why I consistently recommend bootstrapping — failure is much less dire, and there are far fewer people you have to convince you're up to the task of making a second attempt.
Related: Giving My Product Away for Free Was One of the Best Business Decisions I Made — Here's Why.
You learn humility
To me, a growth mindset is one of the most important attributes an entrepreneur can have — but it does take a certain amount of humility to cultivate.
Part of that process entails asking hard questions and accepting the results with grace. That can mean a business idea that fails to launch or a strategy that falls flat. It can also just mean things not working out the way you wanted them to. I started Jotform as a side hustle alongside my full-time job. But I knew the only way for my business to truly soar was to dedicate myself to it completely. So set a target "quit by" date. And then…I missed it. I set another one and missed that, too. The business just wasn't where I needed it to be in order to justify diving in full-time.
Missing those target dates was a drag, and I certainly had my doubts about whether I was wasting my time. But with every missed target, I recalibrated. I remembered what I had learned from my earlier flops and resisted the urge to pull the trigger before I was ready.
Before I developed the idea for Jotform, I had no way of knowing this would be the one that would finally work. But it also might not have, without the experience of those past failures to guide me. By the time I hit upon the idea for a form builder, I had learned so much: Even good ideas must be adapted. Failure is instructive and not fatal unless you allow it to be.
