Your Business Needs You to Keep Failing

So you can find success

"The secret of life is to fall seven times and to get up eight times."

— Paulo Coelho

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There are lots of books out there these days that espouse the virtues of failing. While the idea of failing can be freeing, it’s also super scary.

Failing implies that the risk you took was not a smart one. It implies that maybe, you, as the fail-er, are somehow unworthy of success in any capacity.

Wow, how uplifting.

Stay with me here. It’s a well-known fact that we humans tend to take on the word failure as a title we call ourselves instead of using it to describe a result of some action we have taken.

No wonder we’re so hung up on the word.

Experimenting…

A bit of good news

Along with stories in books, there are lots of actual people that have failed at one point(s) or another on their journey: Abraham Lincoln failed several times at being elected to public office, Michael Jordan has all his failure stats well-documented, Thomas Edison failed 10,000 times in his lightbulb experiments.

The thing is, all of them have not only extensively talked about and quantified their failures (so we could all easily see them, that’s brave), but they also say they could not have been successful without their failures.

Notice, not a one of them said “I am a failure”. They all said that a thing they tried to do failed.

Huge difference.

Failures aren’t fun…or are they?

Like most people I know, I have a love/hate relationship with failure.

On the one hand, I can clearly see the value in failing. And some days, it’s a really clear view. And, we have all heard someone remind us that we learn more from our failures than we do from our successes. I don’t (wholly) disagree. Every time I fail, I can clearly see that ‘the thing’ didn’t work. Oh, yay.

Yes, it still stings.

Unless…

Unless I can re-frame it as something I can use in my next iteration.

The challenge for us solopreneurs is that we’re out here doing these things on our own. We don’t always have a bunch of people around telling us to keep going, that failure is simply the result of an action, not a word to use as a person-describer. The people around us may not see the failed action as an educator and may not be helpful in reminding us that that’s what it is.

At the same time, we’re so eager to move on, create, take things to the next level…and above all not fail.

SO, how do we go about doing this?

Running experiments

Well, first off, we have to find ways to experiment. We have to find ways to try something, fail, learn, edit, re-try, repeat. And, we have to find ways to do this with a reduced risk. I’m not talking about ‘embarrassment risk’, I’m talking about resources risk.

Most of us don’t have unlimited resources available to work through all these experiments.

So, how can we lessen this risk?

The platform is the lab

I’ve been talking about platforms and marketplaces for the past few weeks now. For us solopreneurs, they can be a great place to run low-risk experiments with our products and services.

To be clear, I’m not saying you should just throw something up on a platform and see what sticks – like spaghetti on a wall. No. If you really want to learn something valuable from your experiments, you’ve got to put some thought into your efforts and into your offers.

Trying out a product or service on a platform you've researched and crafted a solid offering for is a great initial test.

And guess what, there’s a high chance that first experiment won’t work.

But also guess what, that’s your first learning. And it’s likely you didn’t have to spend a fortune to learn it.

And the other great thing is, you can edit that offer and try again. And then again. Each time, you learn something.

Most platforms allow to you post and edit as much as you like without cost. You can edit your descriptions, keywords, imagery, pricing…all for no extra fees and just a little of your time.

And then, after some experimenting, you’ll earn your first customer. Yahoo! (and then, you’ll learn from that too)

So, I say, go ahead, feel free to fall 7 times, you’ve now got some (re-framed) tools to use to get up 8. Experiment away!

Stay tuned,

Julie

P.S. So…now what??

Subscribers to my newsletter get the starter version of the 4-step Define Your Wedge worksheet (in your welcome email), which will help you better understand your market and where your experience and expertise fit into your product/service niche. Of course, you can get the full version here.

And I just rolled out another quick tool, The Solopreneur’s Guide to Platforms & Marketplaces that lists and details out some of the popular platforms and marketplaces where you can get started. I plan to keep adding to this.

Both are experiments of mine, based on my experience and expertise in market research and in posting my own products and services on platforms and marketplaces.