How Failing in Building a Company Heightened my Intellect
By: Alamiin Si
Tags: Founder Stories, Startup, Business, Entrepreneurship, Entrepreneur

For a founder, shutting down a company is like dumping your most beloved person in the entire world; even worse, finding them dead the next day.

Failure is a common term for any rising startup. This never ceases to be true even with the overwhelming success stories repeatedly saturating our Quora feed. If anything, the percentage of startups failing in their first year continue to spring up through the last decade.

It takes a gallant to be an entrepreneur, as nobody ever built any great company overnight. One has to be courageous enough to say yes when everyone else says no, ignoring statistics others lived by their entire lives.

Like all founders, I suffered several terrible blows, got back up, and tried all over again in my quest to building a company.

Mine might not be the journey with a pleasant ending, but then I owe my growth to it. I’d continue to regard entrepreneurship as a word on people’s Twitter bio if not for my attempt to pursue the not-so-pretty-adventure of building a company.

What happened?

It’s been a year since I had to make the bitter decision to shut down my company. It was a marketing consultancy I co-founded with a friend and worked with a team of a few people. We had a good run. Seven months later, we had to close everything down and let go of a startup we all grew so attached to. It was devastating.

Looking back at the fuzzy memories now, I cherish how brave it was of me to undertake on such a journey with so little chance of scaling up, to begin with. I also came to see how wrong I was in the numerous assumptions I made while starting.

I’ve seen how fundraising takes time — postponed meetings with potential investors drove me mad. It was frustrating, especially taking into account that my most important role as the CEO was to make sure that the company always has the necessary money to run it.

Every other startup founder I’ve met told me a similar story, but I’ve never seen it clearer.

I’ve also seen how vital it is to have a partner whose strengths complement my weaknesses, even if that means laying my best friend off the ride. Clinging to friends, at the expense of competence, is usually the first mistake many founders make in crashing their company.

I’ve come to learn how building a product for a customer is underexplained. Your product can be perfect for the customer that is, unfortunately, in the wrong audience you’re marketing to.

This factor aids in the failure of my company. We were so obsessed with offering the best service (our product) that we lost sight of who our ideal customers were. It was like taking a cruise, partying too much on the ship, only to wake up and find ourselves in the wilderness of the sea. We knew everything was right when we started but had no idea how we ended up where we found ourselves.

How do these heighten my intellect?

There is no way I can be able to share all the lessons I learned in that half-year. I’ve learned a lot of things. But then if there is anything that helped in deepening my intellect, it is realizing how negligent I was when it comes to listening to founders with failed startups.

I realize just how many mistakes I could have avoided if I’d spent my time reading fewer success stories and dredge enough of what I could about other people’s mistakes.

The success stories shared on the internet are fulfilling to consume, and if I must admit, almost ecstatic. Nobody likes listening to failures. The internet would be saturated with such stories if that wasn’t the case — with 90% of startups failing.

It is almost guaranteed that the guest speaker at the last founders’ convention you attended was running a successful company. Who will invite some loser to speak at their event, right?

Yet, it is becoming more important to listen to founders with a darker side of these narratives. It might not be fun and liberating, but just as insightful and instructive for all.

Such founders will tell you why embracing criticism with an open mind is your shortest path to growth. Or better yet, how dismissing critics’ harsh words could, in many instances, be lethal to your company’s image.

Every other founder can say that, sure. But while a founder with a successful venture is likely to gobble his way to, “…and that is how we convinced Mr. Rogers to invest a $100k into our company!”… a failed founder will remind you to drink less water before pitching to a potential investor, saving you from constantly excusing yourself in answering the call of nature. And that… that, my friend, will make a huge difference in the first impression you make.

While a successful founder will urge you to hire a great team, a failed founder will tell you why you’d rather have someone work for you even if they are not the smartest person in the room, so long they are passionate about the product of your startup.

Failed startup founders can tell you a lot of things, some of which might completely be their insecurities, I agree. It doesn’t mean you have to act on everything, but all they say will help you in judging more accurately when you come to make similar decisions. Besides, who better help you in figuring your way around dangerous traps than someone who once got caught by one.

There isn’t a magic wand to wave and rectify all the glitches you’ll ever face on your entrepreneurial journey. To narrow down, there isn’t a step-by-step guide in handling all the failures you’ll encounter in building your company. These are unique experiences, and no one can teach you anything to its marrow.

But if your startup ever fails — which many of us fancy dismissing the possibility of — it will be easier to deal with, when you’ve listened to how others handled this unfortunate incident.