As others have said, it depends on how you define success. My first attempt at a business was/is selling a software application in a freemium model. I made $400 the first month, $1800 the next, and it's gone up and down since then. I don't make enough to quit my full-time job, but enough to pay down my mortgage and save up some capital for my next business that I'm working on getting off the ground.
Poll: How many times did you fail before succeeding?
11–20 of 22 posts
Re: Poll: How many times did you fail before succeeding?
#12I think success is what you define it. At the moment - my own definition for my start up is enough earnings for me not to rely on getting another job on the side.
Re: Poll: How many times did you fail before succeeding?
#13If youre looking at statistics you probably have no idea of what you're doing.
Information is alienated experience.
Try something diferent. Also: if you're doing the same that 95% of the people: you're doing it wrong.
Re: Poll: How many times did you fail before succeeding?
#14If not starting is a failure, then I failed a lot.
I have literally never had business go according to plan, which stands to reason, because for some unfathomable reason we plan before execution instead of after when we know the results. This has always struck me as wasteful.
Re: Poll: How many times did you fail before succeeding?
#15I think success is what you define it. At the moment - my own definition for my start up is enough earnings for me not to rely on getting another job on the side.
Outside of tech-startup-land I think that is most entrepreneurs definition of success. Then you start adding goals to success like "not have to get a job and can take a vacation every once in a while"
Re: Poll: How many times did you fail before succeeding?
#16I'm still a broke hacker living in flyover country, USA but I've always had wild success in everything I've done in some way or another. Usually, it's in lessons learned, contacts made and people helped. Kind of disappointed at the narrow scope of "success" for this poll. Should have been labeled "How many times did you fail before getting rich?"
Do you cover your bills? Significant income.
Re: Poll: How many times did you fail before succeeding?
#17depends. if we are talking individual ideas, I went through 4 before I found something that was actually profitable(~$2-3K of affiliate marketing). 5, before I found that "million dollar idea"(it's not making 6 figures/mo yet...but it'll get there) if we are talking individual projects that number is closer to 50-60(since I made like 40 2-3 page made for adsense/affiliate marketing sites and 10 Q&A sites)
so, just to be perfectly clear, your success is in spamming - right?
Re: Poll: How many times did you fail before succeeding?
#18If not starting is a failure, then I failed a lot. I have literally never had business go according to plan, which stands to reason, because for some unfathomable reason we plan before execution instead of after when we know the results. This has always struck me as wasteful.
The second is wasteful, the first can be useful. It will help to plan before execution so you have a good mental model of the parameter space that your business is operating in which will help you with guidance when decisions need to be made. It would be delusional to think that you can completely model the problem before you have data so as you go forward you'll have to adjust the model and therefore the plan.
It basically is an instrument to cut down on the number of surprises that you'll encounter along the way and it gives you some measure of control.
Some people get stuck at the planning stage, they never make the jump to implementation, but at some point further planning becomes a pointless exercise and you just have to bite the bullet and do something.
Re: Poll: How many times did you fail before succeeding?
#19"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." --George Bernard Shaw
Re: Poll: How many times did you fail before succeeding?
#20It's funny, I crossed the profitability line a while back after several failed attempts, but I don't really feel much different. When I finally did make a "successful" company, it was a little like when you've been practicing a song on an instrument for a while and you look at one bit that has always felt a bit not right, and you tweak it a bit and you realize that you just corrected a mistake that you had been unknowingly repeating. Or when you're speaking a foreign language and your ears can suddenly hear a place where you've always been speaking with a slight accent but which you didn't know about before.
My point is, from the beginning, I've made many such realizations and corrections and at some point I guess I just made enough to be able to create a profitable company.
The flip-side is, I feel like I'm still playing my instrument badly, just slightly less badly than before. Every day I wake up anxious about sales and think about my latest expansion plans - just trying to add stones to the wall that stands between me and starvation, which is what I've been doing all along.
I'd be interested to hear if others have had a similar experience as I.