Learning from Failure – Premature Scaling

Rewardme was a loyalty program for restaurants and retailers which closed down in mid 2015. The startup was funded and spent a lot of money in trying to acquire customers and scale the business. What made them close shop was that they spent huge amounts of money in acquiring customers without really having a clear business plan and product market fit. Their customer acquisitions costs went through the roof and eventually the startup ran out of funding.

Advice – Cash is king. You need to find the best product market fit before deciding to spend cash on scaling the business.

Failure is the Best Teacher

To learn, it is important you fail a few times. Every failure is because of some mistake one makes. Learning from mistakes is a trait of a successful entrepreneur.

Learn to Embrace Rejection

If you’re planning to be an entrepreneur, be ready for things not to always work out. Be ready to realize you cannot control everything. Be ready to realize you can be the greatest at some things, and the worst at others. That is okay. At the end of the day, persistence and consistency is all that matters. When you put in the work, rejection and failure will end up as one of your largest sources of motivation, keeping things in perspective for you, making you want to taste success, and accomplish your goals, that much more. Learn to embrace rejection, and when you do, nothing in this world will hold you back.

(The author is Joshua Davidson, Founder of ChopDawg.com)

Try & Try Hard

'If you don’t fail at least 90 percent of the time, you’re not aiming high enough'...Alan Kay

We often try so hard to make our startup a 'success', our definition of success keeps getting diluted over time. In Bitequest, we started out with trying to make it a restaurant discovery and discount website. As we went on, we could not see a revenue model for quite some time. Suddenly our team members decided to make it an offline call-center kind of a model where we would charge a commission from the restaurants for the customers sent by us. This was not a well thought move and was somewhat in desperation. It would start giving immediate revenue but would definitely make it more difficult for us to scale and we really had no vision for the company with this new business model. Generating revenue was an immediate goal for us and once we did start generating revenue, we felt that we are succeeding with this new avatar of the company. 

It's important that we should not solely look at 'success', failing along the way to reach a longer term goal is essential. Finding the right model, which is scalable and sustainable, lies at the core of any startup.