But failure reveals the truth about what works, and what doesn’t. It teaches, toughens and, finally, leads us to the solution that finally works.
In the March 2007 edition of Business 2.0, Tom McNichol provides insight on why failure can provide shortcuts to success. Here’s a summary:
A startup’s best friend? Failure.
When San Francisco Web designer Ted Rheingold co-founded Dogster.com in January 2004 as a kind of Friendster, the news drew smirks from the few who bothered to notice. How could Dogster, a pet site cobbled together on weekends and launched on a shoestring budget, expect to succeed where lavishly funded pet sites had flamed out? The consensus on Dogster was unanimous: it would fail.
Since its launch, Dogster has indeed failed, repeatedly, in ways its founders never imagined. But that, it turns out has been a good thing. Dogster has found a way to turn its mistakes into better features. With virtually no promotion, Dogster has become a leading social network for pet lovers, boasting more than 275,000 human members, 340,000 photos and profiles of dogs and cats, and a stable of blue-chip advertisers such as Disney, Holiday Inn, and Target. Dogster has even done something Pets.com never came close to doing: It has turned a modest profit.
Along the way the site has become a case study in how to fail well—by launching features quickly, seeing what works, and fixing things on the fly. “When we roll out a new feature, we know we’re probably not going to get it right the first time,” Rheingold says…
…today’s successful Internet businesses embrace defects as a way to get things right. Some management consultants even advise their clients to “get good” at screwing up. “Failure is the enemy of efficiency, but it’s the best way to learn,” says Robert E. Gunther, a business consultant for Decision Strategies International in Conshohocken, PA. Gunther encourages clients to make “deliberate mistakes” to learn faster.
Failing isn’t just a strategy for startups. One of Silicon Valley’s best companies at managing failure also happens to be its hottest: Google. “Fundamentally, everything we do is an experiment,” says Douglas Merril, a Google vice president for engineering. “The thing with experimentation is that you have to get data and then be brutally hones when you’re assessing it.” When introducing new features, Google has remained true to a “fail fast” strategy: launch, listen, improve, launch again.
…that’s what happened with Google Answers, a four-year effort to build an expert answer service that was shuttered in November. “I don’t think Answers was a failure, because we incorporated a lot of what we learned into our new custom search engine,” Merrill says. “The failures are the things where you don’t learn anything.”
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