Failure is a stepping stone, not a headstone

If I could start my company over, I see so many things I could do differently.

But I’m not sure I would change anything.

I sometimes go down a rabbit hole thinking about the early days—all my pitch decks with pipe dream J curves, discussions I had with people comparing us to unicorns, spreadsheet after spreadsheet of models projecting revenue 20X above where we are today.

I’m wiser now. If I relived it with what I know now, sure I’d be a better CEO.

But the journey is also how we got here.

We found a gap in the market that no one else is serving because we slogged through some mistakes and bad bets.

Without that journey, though, the destination probably wouldn’t have existed.

A series of unfortunate events

When my cofounder Zack and I go to startup events today, we realize we're kind of the papaws in the group. Many of these companies were now formed post-pandemic, and we've definitely got some "wear on the tires” as a recent potential investor told me. In many ways, this has taken me longer than I expected, but who could have predicted some of the things we’ve been through?

We’ve had some adversity:

The wrong play: I was truly full time by the end of 2018. In 2019, we were modeling our app closer to a Reddit / Strava for hunters and anglers. By the end of 2019, we launched a new gear feature to tag the gear you’re using in the field (an early version of “social commerce” as it’s known now). Within weeks, the outdoor gear feature had more utilization than a year of activity tracking. We sunset the activity tracking in early 2020, taking one on the chin.

A black swan: I was supposed to close a funding round at the end of March with an investor. COVID hit, and in mid March, we lost $750K (or 3/4 of the commitment from this one investor). It wasn’t their fault—the market took a dive, and their investors were no longer liquid. Right as that was happening, all of our deals locked in from trade show season started bombing. Clients were reneging on ad deals we had secured mere weeks prior. Hundreds of thousands of projected revenue vanished. Promises to come back in June also never transpired when the outdoor industry saw a massive shortage in inventory. No inventory, no need for advertising.

The pivot: In Q2 of 2020, we only made $9,200. It was the worst quarter we’d had since launch. We were in free fall, and scrambled to come up with a new business model. In 90 days, we built our first shop, and launched with just 8 brands. We immediately beat that pitiful Q2 revenue, but the launch was followed with nasty bugs and a year of learnings, complete with bad partnership decisions, worse hires, and literally having no clue what we were doing. After a few months though, we were cranking out Q2 2020’s revenue every month, and then in a week. I still remember the first time we beat that entire quarter in a single day. And again the next day.

The market dive: After the initial market slump in COVID, the market rebounded, fundraising was frothier than it had ever been, valuations were rich, and cash was cheap because interest rates were minimal. But after months of the government handing out cash to anyone with fingers to grab it, inflation soared, high interest rates followed in an attempt to combat it, and the rug was pulled out from under many businesses. Companies that bet on the COVID surge for ecommerce took a tumble when shopping behavior reset and credit card debt racked up for Americans.

These bruises made us who we are

GoWild will have nearly 900 brands in our store by the end of this year—14,000% increase from our first shop. Because of all of these ups and downs (and there are even more—this is my lousy attempt at brevity), we figured out what didn’t work, and built a better way. The experience has also shown us huge gaps and problems within not only ecommerce, but other areas in the market. We’re using that newfound knowledge to launch Holler Commerce.

When someone comments on the fact we’ve been around for a while, I’m quick to point out that the experience in what didn’t work—and the fact that we weren’t one of the more than 100,000 businesses who failed post-pandemic—is why you should bet on us.

“Failure worship” has taken over tech. It’s gotten weird, honestly. But I’ve long believed failure isn’t something to hide from, and it’s not a bad thing. Failure is a consequence of doing something new, and it’s part of a natural journey to finding how. One of the best stories is the most famous “Water Displacement” tool on the market, WD40. The inventors tried 39 other formulas before finding the best perfect displacement formula. No. 40 became the famed product you probably have in your garage, WD40.

Too many businesses either ignore failure or don’t take the risk to fail

It would be easy for me to look at social media giants and compare my company to them. I could look at Facebook, LinkedIn or TikTok and be jealous. But I stay rooted in that I’m not trying to recreate what’s been done, we’re trying to invent something new. If you’re starting a new company with a unique point of view, and you’re not experiencing failure, you’re not going big enough to win. Failure is a natural part of invention. Failure is a stepping stone, not a headstone.

If your business is not recognizing failure, there are likely two reasons why:

1) You’re not paying attention to the right metrics

When we launched our activity tracking feature, we were thrilled to see hundreds of people using it. It felt so good to open up the app and scroll through people who were logging their archery with our activity log, which captured how many arrows you fired in each round and data about your accuracy. Even some investors raved about it. However, when we looked at the adoption compared to the rest of the app, it became clear—95% of the members weren’t using it. Even worse, when we started talking to people who weren’t using it, they had concerns around privacy (if you’re hunting your private spot, you may have reservations about publicly sharing an activity, even if we did completely anonymize it—they knew that data was still there).

It was failing.

We weren’t paying attention to the right metric. Businesses do this all the time, boasting strong email open rates when conversion rates are still in the dumps, or boasting new customer sign ups for marketing lists when average order value or checkouts among this audience are in the dumps. If you’re trying to build something new, and you’re not finding failures along the way, you may need to look at your KPIs with fresh angles, or even create new KPIs. This fall we’ll redesign our KPIs from soup to nuts to account for our new metrics of success. This is healthy.

2) You’re playing it too safe

So many startups start off tackling a monster total addressable market by doing something slightly better than the competition. I see this all the time in the hunting space, as I get a lot of pitch decks sent to me. At this point, I think I’ve seen a dozen marketplaces for hunting and fishing spots, and the founders are usually building something that’s maybe 15% better than what everyone else does. Of all of these companies, only a couple have a fresh take that may claim the market. The rest are playing it safe because it’s familiar with the Airbnb model—but safe didn’t build Airbnb to a $98B market cap. In fact, Airbnb’s first pitch was borderline insane in the eyes of investors.

The worst thing about this version of not failing is that you’ll die a slow death. Things are working, in theory, but the pace is slow, the scale is too small, and it’s a limp-along experience until you run out of cash or, probably worse, enthusiasm for what you’re doing.

When faced with the possibility of a slow, stagnant death in a pool of bromidic backwash, I’ll take being the company with some wear on the tires who is making big bets and managing to survive, against the odds.

My story isn’t done. I can’t tell anyone we’ll make it—2020 taught me to never think like that again. But I do think we have what we need to win.

A potential investor asked me recently what I thought we’d become. What he meant was, “how much do you think you can sell this thing for?” I told him immediately, I don’t think we’ll become a unicorn (the sought after billion dollar valuation). Honestly, I am not suited to run a unicorn company. But what I can tell you is at this phase, with us betting the house on Holler Commerce’s ability to rapidly expand our footprint and change the way companies approach commerce, you’re not betting on the business model. You’re betting on the jockeys, and that we’re not afraid to take some knocks on the inside rail because it’s going to hurt or be ugly or dirty. We can run in the mud. We’ve been hit in the mouth. And we know how to stay in the race despite the bumps.

When it comes to betting, the biggest returns aren’t in playing it safe.

It’s in the risk.

Evaluating your risk

1) Pay attention to the right metrics

Write out the top 3-5 metrics that really matter for your business. Not what you report to your boss or what the CEO talks about—what is really driving the business? Now, for each of these, think about what moves the needle for each of those? If you write out 3-5 more levers you can pull for each of these, you’ll likely find a host of new business metrics you can monitor, and likely even some things you can tweak in the short term to take some short-term risk for gains.

2) Stop playing it safe

If your company knows these KPIs well, and you’re not growing or improving them, and you’re not launching new products or services to expand, you’re playing it too safe. Think through your core areas of the business—what’s growing, and what’s stagnant? What are your competitors doing, and what gaps are they missing? Talk to your customers—and theirs. Find where the pain points are, and start ideating on how you can heal those pains. Take some risk, try something new, and get back to creating.

Who I’m listening to: Nic Jamerson

What I’m reading: “Play Bigger” by the Category Pirates

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