The Reason We Failed

Seth Godin wrote a fantastic blog entry today entitled The Secret of the Web wherein he outlines the dangers of start-up companies who pitch their ideas, and then work as hard they can for a brief period of time to make the idea go big. To use a quote from Mr. Godin:

“I discovered a lucky secret the hard way about thirty years ago: you can outlast the other guys if you try. If you stick at stuff that bores them, it accrues. Drip, drip, drip you win.”

Using the “make it big, fast” mentality, if your site goes big, you’re a success without hardly having to try. If it fails (in that short period of time) call it a bad idea, blame it on your users, call the market “not ready” and move on. Ad infinitum.

I guess this is the reason we started this blog, really. David and I saw this happening before our very eyes, but by the time we recognized what was happening, we were too late. Had we launched our flagship product, been humble about our growth and fostered healthy community around a needed service, we could have made it.

However, just as the article indicates, we were trapped in an unhealthy mindset. We wanted to be good, and we wanted it now, but things just don’t work that way.

Over the next few months we’re going to chronicle exactly what that looked like for us. To be honest, we had both “the right way” and “the wrong way” right in front of us, and (call if lack of inexperience, overexcitement, or what have you) we took the latter.  Give the article a try, and then subscribe to our feed to watch what that looked like for us, and how we would have prevented it.

Tags: article, astar, business practices, quick, seth godin, startup
This entry was posted on Sunday, August 10th, 2008 at 5:53 pm and is filed under Strategy.
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