Learning from Failure – Passion Drives a Startup

You must realize that starting a company is a long and tiring process. You start a company, face obstacles, pivot, then scale, then fail, pivot and so on. So with some many challenges along the way, what drives you? Passion & the excitement you feel when you talk about your startup. The day this passion starts going down, you are bound to give up.

Jeanette Cajide is a great example of an entrepreneur burning out. She started Blurtt, an app for creating and sharing digital expressions through photos. She started the app on 2009 with a very different concept, curated photography for creating and sending out postcards from your phone. On not being able to scale up, she pivoted to another model in 2010, and another one in 2011 and finally the final model in 2012. She was trying to reach a model which was scalable and which was ‘investor friendly’. She then realized that she was probably not doing what she had set out to do and was feeling burnt out as a result of this roller coaster journey. She finally closed down the startup in February 2014.

Advice – An entrepreneur’s passion is the energy which drives a startup. This energy helps you find the right path and keeps you going. The day you feel the energy is going down, it might be time to close down.