This is the presentation that I'm going to give on Saturday 6th of March at Bizcamp Dublin.
I‘m going to talk to you about something that is really under-rated – failure. Failure is something that I like to think I‘m good at – after all I have enough experience! Every day I come to work, and every day I‘m wrong, but find that at the end of the month, or at the end of the year, something good and right has been created out of all that failure.
So who am I? Currently I run RevaHealth.com, a vertical search engine that allows consumers to find and compare health clinics anywhere – kind of like comparison shopping for dentistry, laser eye surgery, fertility etc. We list 60,000 clinics and get over 10,000 hits a day.
Before RevaHealth.com, I led the product and engineering team at NewBay Software, where we developed and deployed mobile social applications for telecommunication companies – such as myfaves for T-Mobile and Bluebook for O2. While I was there, we rolled out applications to over 15 million people across 5 continents.
At Baltimore technology, which was briefly a Nasdaq darling, I marketed the flagship product line, UniCERT, which had revenues in excess of $100M annually.
Most of us in this room want to do something new. We see a gap or a need, and feel that we can develop a product to meet that gap. For most of us that means doing something new. It might be a new product, a new business model or even just a new enhancement to a product or service that is already out there. But fundamentally, we want to do something new. The problem with NEW is that it is always WRONG. This doesn’t mean that you’re totally wrong, there is a good chance that your NEW has some merit – it just never works out the way you expect it.
As an entrepreneur, you need to be confident that your NEW idea is going to work. So confident, that you actually get off your backside and go do it. You need the near arrogance to go and take other people’s hard earn cash, so you can build your NEW idea, and you need to believe in your NEW idea enough to be able to convince other people to invest their most valuable resource – their time- to help you build it.
This confidence in your NEW idea + the unshakable reality that, for the most part, your idea has some fundamental flaws = The Entrepreneurial Emotional Rollercoaster
The first stage is the most important stage. It’s the one where you think you have it all worked out! It gives you the motivation to move forward and get your idea built.
The second stage is normally a couple of weeks after finishing the product when you realize that you aren't going to rule the world becuase you were wrong in some way. This is depressing
The final stage is when you realise and accept your failure and learn from it. Although being wrong wasn’t much fun, at least you now know what not to do.
Now, from years of going through these stages, you might think I would know all this, but even now I still fall into the trap of spending excessive time and effort trying to mitigate failure.
So here is an example of something that recently happened at RevaHealth.com, that hopefully illustrates what I’m talking about. We have always had a fairly unusual and unique User Interface. Whenever a user searched on our site we would return a list of results on the left hand side on the page. When a user clicked on the search result the brochure would appear on the right hand side of the page. We built it this way because we thought that it would allow users to be able to compare clinics quickly without having to reload the page.
We were never entirely happy with this interface- we worried that, because it was so unique, people wouldn’t know how to use it. Nonetheless we stuck with the basic premise for over a year and concentrated on fine tuning it.
When we finally secured funding we decided to look at it again. We solicited feedback from a load of people, including some leading design agencies. What we got back was nearly universal – everyone hated our UI! It was too cluttered, they didn’t know how to use it, it was too unusual etc. Finally we decided we needed to change to a more tradition approach, of search results on one page and brochure information on a second page.
We spent a lot of time on it and did our best to mitigate failure by getting expert advice. We did usability and coding testing.
What happened surprised everyone – it was a disaster. Bounce rate went from 45% to 51%, page view reduced by 25% and, worst of all, conversion rate went from 7.2% down to 2.4%. IT WAS KILLING 75% OF OUR REVENUE! After a week of counting the cost, we pulled it out and brought back the old design.
So, despite having thought long and hard about the UI, speaking to the best experts money could buy, doing usability testing etc – it turned out we were just wrong.
Just about everything is binware. If I think back over the products and features that I’ve managed, the vast majority of them ended up in the bin, providing no value to anyone other than the lessons learned. You know that there are plenty of products getting man years of engineering effort in future proofing scalabilty, that never get used by a single real user.
The only way that you can succeed is by learning how to fail cheaply.
Get your application/feature done quickly and in a raw format.
Most importantly, when you do fail, recognise that failure as a necessary stepping stone to success.
Don’t worry about the bells and whistles. Don’t listen to anyone who doesn’t like your colours, you’ll never please them. Whatever you do, don’t even think about scalability until you have proven that people will actually use the product.
Something a lot of bigger companies do to try and mitigate failure is employ expensive experts in a field. My experience is that if you are trying to do something new, you are better off just getting your idea out there in the rawest form possible.
Above all, you must recognize when your idea, and not the rest of the world, was wrong and move forward.
What I’ve been talking about here is the good type of failure– there is also a bad type of failure which I’m sure everyone here is guilty of. This is when you fail because you just couldn’t be bothered trying, or you get lazy and don’t give your project the attention it deserves. This type of failure is not a stepping stone to success, it is just failure.
So, my message is:
Try Hard
Fail Often
Fail cheaply
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