Fail Faster
The other day I was invited to lecture at Hyper Island about my story and my approach to entrepreneurship. But what was I to say? Hyper Island features some of the worlds leading innovators and entrepreneurs, how could I deliver anything convincing in the shadow of giants?
I realized that although I have not yet succeded in buidling a multimillion dollar business as of current date theres one thing I have done more times than most people, one thing I continue to do over and over again and one thing that I’m really starting to get the hang of. Put bluntly that one thing is failing. I’ve failed so many times..
How failing brought me forward
I never speak of it, in fact it’s like it never happened. It was called Svensk Formagentur and it was my first company.
I had just finished high school and desperately wanted to start something. I teamed up with my friend Conrad Gerlach in an effort to create an agency for freelance designers. I guess that I was more in love with having a company than the company itself.
We got an office, business cards, put up a webpage, got our first few designers to join but what we didn’t get was an assignment. And I mean no assignment what so ever. (Big surprise!) We were terrrified and during our short blaze of existence we didn’t make a single sales call.
After a few weeks Conrad was offered employment at JayCut, a swedish startp focused on online video editing (now acquired by RIM) - obviously he accepted and Svensk Formagentur became my first business failure. However, during those few glorious days on the sinking ship Conrad often invited over his friend Kaj (who I also knew from high school) to the office to hang around. Lonely as ever, without a clue on what to do next Kaj became who I reached out to. A few weeks later me and Kaj founded our agency, Super Strikers. It was a #win but only for so long…
You see, Super Strikers failed to attract enough clients, leaving us with too much time on our hands. We accepted and adapted and took that time to develop our own product, it was Keyflow and introduced digital guestlistsystems to the world (credit to Conrad Gerlach who in fact played an important role in the concept of Keyflow and off course to Alex Ryden and Leo Hallerstam).
Keyflow failed to bring any meaningful revenue to Super strikers, atleast originally. However it did connect us to Spotify which later became our biggest client. (I’ll tell you how and why some other time )
We then failed to recruit Birk, first at super strikers and after the acquirement once again at Identity Works which lead us to start a company with him. Each big step I’ve taken forward during my short carrier has been preceeded by a failure of some sort.
Fail faster
Its anything but a new idea but it’s an important one. A we cant anything for sure, at best we can have assmptions about things. It seems unlikely that these assumptions will align perfectly with reality at the first attempt. Hence, in order to succeed you will have to fail a lot of times. So how can we fail better?
Well, I believe the important answer here is ‘faster’. A good fail happens at a early stage and is cheap. It gives you new relevant insights which you can reiterate upon. It allows you to change the story, the packaging and realign your ambition to better fit the market.
A bad fail is always the failure to take action. Its ill-fated behaviour that makes people hold on to the stocks that are going bad and sell the ones that are rocketing. The failure to take action is what allows, what could have been a good fail that would have lead you to the next step, to become expensive and difficult to reiterate upon. This is the kind of failure we see happening to companys all the time; why didn’t kodak build flickr? Why didn’t flickr build instagram?
Today, the biggest risk might be to try to play your life risk free as the working conditions constantly change.
I believe that this reasoning can be applied to everything from design to product development to strategic business decisions. By opening ourselves up for failure, to accept it and adapt to it, we also give ourselves the chance to succeed. How can you fail today?
