Re:Tenacity
by dahart on Friday January 15, 2016 @01:02PM
(#10910918)
> How do you actually know an idea has failed, though?
Damn good question, and I don't think there's an easy answer.
If you listen to almost any successful founders' stories, you'll hear about struggles and 'failures' that they had to work through. A lot of them can talk about how if they hadn't changed something, or if some event or realization hadn't happened, that failure was imminent. Some of them talk about how they did fail, sometimes more than once, then tried something else and succeeded.
Unless you learn through trying that the idea really truly can't work and there's no market whatsoever (which I'd speculate is rare), it's probably up to you to determine what success and failure actually mean, how to measure them, and what to do when they happen.
If you only have a strictly limited time or money budget, then not succeeding within the window is a type of failure, and maybe what most people mean by failure. But that doesn't mean the idea won't ever succeed, it just means it didn't succeed fast enough for your budget. I'm guessing this is the functional definition of failure for most people.
Now the question is why, because it could have been for any number of reasons, market fit, skills, team, execution, timing, anything. This is why the trend in startup thinking is to perform activities that seek to answer questions about your business hypothesis, and find out why you're failing, scientifically, before you fail.
If you can live on ramen forever, and your idea doesn't cost much money to implement, and it makes you happy to keep trying, you might not ever need to declare a failure, you could indeed keep improving it.
Damn good question, and I don't think there's an easy answer.
If you listen to almost any successful founders' stories, you'll hear about struggles and 'failures' that they had to work through. A lot of them can talk about how if they hadn't changed something, or if some event or realization hadn't happened, that failure was imminent. Some of them talk about how they did fail, sometimes more than once, then tried something else and succeeded.
Unless you learn through trying that the idea really truly can't work and there's no market whatsoever (which I'd speculate is rare), it's probably up to you to determine what success and failure actually mean, how to measure them, and what to do when they happen.
If you only have a strictly limited time or money budget, then not succeeding within the window is a type of failure, and maybe what most people mean by failure. But that doesn't mean the idea won't ever succeed, it just means it didn't succeed fast enough for your budget. I'm guessing this is the functional definition of failure for most people.
Now the question is why, because it could have been for any number of reasons, market fit, skills, team, execution, timing, anything. This is why the trend in startup thinking is to perform activities that seek to answer questions about your business hypothesis, and find out why you're failing, scientifically, before you fail.
If you can live on ramen forever, and your idea doesn't cost much money to implement, and it makes you happy to keep trying, you might not ever need to declare a failure, you could indeed keep improving it.