Loosing a few battles is fine, as long as you win the war. Loosing them teaches you how to win the war. :/
I agree though. 'thinking' about an idea for 3 days and deciding you don't want to do it != failure.
It seems to me that their product would cannibalize their own consulting business -- Which is a perfectly understandable reason to not pursue an opportunity. But I don't buy the "failure in 3 days" excuse, especially when they had some evidence that clients could be interested in such product.
What's important to remember is that even though it's important, failure still has a cost - be it in lost money, lost opportunity, lost time, etc. You're trading something away in exchange for knowledge. You need to make sure you maximize the value of that transaction by making your failures as cheap as possible.
To be more clear, maybe we should replace "fail early, fail often," with "test early, reject often." The point of the phrase is to get you to test your ideas as soon as possible, before you sink too much work into them.
The dichotomy isn't between "fail XOR succeed" but between "let it be tested XOR keep working until it's 100% complete."
If you can chalk that up to a good learning experience and something that should be written about, then I guess every Tom, Dick and Harry should be Nobel Prize winning Pulitzer Prize waving success.
I do know that if you think that failure is an option, the probability that you use that option increases dramatically. I'm not trying to use some new age self-help B.S. (well maybe just a little), I'm just suggesting that "state of mind" is critical when taking on difficult projects. Almost everyone I know who has accomplished anything big (including myself) had many opportunities to quit. Failure would have been easy. In fact, for a lot of software projects, there are many times when the whole thing looks hopeless, often right before a great demo or big sale.
I didn't care for OP's easy embrace of "failure" and tried to describe why. I hope that's what came across.
Seems like we're in some kind of time warp here. I understand that with modern technology, things can happen faster, sometimes much faster. But how does spending 3 days determining that a business is not viable constitute a failure?
I really hate the whole "failure is OK" meme. Sure, we all understand that not everything goes perfectly all the time. But we also have those "Is this really worth it?" moments. For some of us, this happens all the time - the harder the project, the more often if happens. Sometimes all that separates real success from real failure is pushing through these moments, determined not to allow speed bumps to stop you.
I'm not suggesting that we will never fail or that we should never give up; sometimes that does make sense. I am suggesting that success is elusive until we adopt a personal policy of "failure is not an option".
OP was not a failure and not an example of this.
Failure is not OK.