Failing your way to success

One of the more frustrating aspects of writing this blog and my job is that I can’t write about specifics due to confidentiality. I work with so many amazing companies and aspiring entrepreneurs that I’d love to write about them more, but I can’t. I’m hoping that one day I’m able to come back to these blog posts and reveal the identity of the company/individual though.

Today, I had one of these amazing stories that I hope to discuss more in detail once I can. I had a due diligence call with a couple executives at a company we’re looking to partner with. The company had a difficult start out of the gates as they severely struggled to grow revenue the first few years. They had a great product that their customers loved, but they operate in a somewhat commoditized space and they had to compete heavily to acquire customers.

The offering itself was not differentiated enough and they were burning cash and revenue was not growing. That’s normally a startup death sentence.

After a few years the company decided to go with a fintech pivot and change up their revenue model. Instead of doing what their competitors were doing, they decided to start offering ancillary services and switch up the model a bit. That turned out to be a pivotal decision that changed the trajectory of the company. Revenue has been growing significantly ever since and they have been blowing up the last couple of years.

What I love most about this startup story is the culture of the company. They were a company that experimented and failed often. They understand that not everything they try will work and stick. But when you find that winning formula, amazing things can happen.

That’s exactly what happened in this instance as clever entrepreneurs realized what they had was not working and sought out to fix it by trying something different. The eventual solution was of course not the only thing they tried. Out of this success story comes many failed experiments and a lot of hard work. They tried, failed and failed again until they found the winning formula.

That’s what a startup is all about. Experimenting, failing and iterating until you make it. We often only hear success stories of startups, but every successful startup has had their failures.