If At First You Don’t Succeed, Maybe You Should Give Up – With Ted Rheingold
on Feb 18, 2009 - 5:08 PM PSTThe full program
This is an audio program. Listen and/or download it here:
A few lessons from this program
What should you do if you’ve been slaving away at your startup and you’re still not seeing results?
Ted Rheingold, founder of pet community sites Dogster and Catster, has an interesting benchmark. Here’s an edited excerpt from his program on Mixergy.
When I launched, the one marketing effort I did–besides sending an email to all my friends–was my girlfriend posted a 3-line entry to Craig’s List Pets section. She said, “If you like dogs, you might like this site.”
And since it was so different, it blew up on Craig’s List. Before that, maybe 5 dogs were added to the site a day. And after that, it became 100 dogs added to the site.
It became this giant fight on Craig’s List. People argued whether it was legitimate to talk about this site or not? Craig Newmark, the site’s founder, even had to get involved. And all that from one little post.
That’s going to be a benchmark for me on any new project, and anything we do. Does it immediately interest our most likely customers? And if it doesn’t, there’s a problem. And it might not be worth working on it at all, or starting again.
If it had gone to Craig’s List and no one was really into it, I probably would have been like, “Huh…. Okay, well this has been fun. Maybe I’ll work on something else.”
I think a lot of people they put too much hope into something working. Even though they’ve gotten the indication that it’s not going to be what they hoped it would be, they still keep working on it.
What do you think? Tell me in the comments. Or tell Ted & me on Twitter!
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February 19th, 2009 at 2:17 am
Great interview. Seems like you have closed the loop. From how to start, how to grow, to knowing when to close. Twitter is down right now so I couldn’t tweet so I’ll just leave the message here.
I went to dogster.com and the first thing I’ve noticed that was very very interesting was the poll. The polls are very interesting and engaging (814 votes at the time of my visit). Very awesome thinking in filling a niche market.
February 19th, 2009 at 8:10 am
Great interview, sections were very relevant to my case in building a new community around a specific theme – especially the part about setting the tone of the site in the terms of service. Keep up the good work..
February 20th, 2009 at 12:10 pm
Great Interview Andrew. All the feedback that I can give you is that you are making an awesome job, keep doing this cool interviews! I would like to suggest a couple of guys for interviews like David Greiner of Campaign Monitor or Ben Chestnut of Mailchimp, two really successful email marketing applications, I have to learn a lot from them ;)
February 20th, 2009 at 5:29 pm
Awesome interview Andrew, always love the content.
It’s interesting about the whole perspective of quitting an idea because you’re not seeing the results we want.
Sometimes though, there’s the 1 thing that you have to fix to hit that home run.
Sometimes you may not even know you’re doing things wrong until you get a different set of eyes or an “expert” to take a look and point you in the right direction.
If you did all you could do and magic didn’t occur, then I agree it could be time to move on.
But do the due diligence to make sure there aren’t things you’re missing!
Great stuff as always,
- TRENDS
February 20th, 2009 at 7:38 pm
@GoTRENDS: I have to respectfully disagree and caution this is very dangerous and emotional way of thinking. It’s the kind of attitude that can lead a developer to lose a whole extra year on a product when they could have moved over to something that is a hit from almost the get-go.
Look back at the successful companies of the last 5 years. How many had products that were plodding along until one tweak changed everything. I can’t think of any.
I can think of companies that realized that something new they were doing were much better than what they had started working on (Flickr out of Game Never Ending, Twitter out of Odeo, MyBlogLog out of blog stats) but they all left they unpopular idea altogether and started on the entirely new ones. Almost never is a great product or company just one small change from taking off.
February 22nd, 2009 at 2:45 am
This is a great point. In life the concept of never giving up is essential but in business it can be deadly. To keep working on one idea no matter how much it’s failing is as arrogant as thinking you’re always right.
February 22nd, 2009 at 3:18 pm
I had to post this clip because Ted Rheingold gave us the clearest and most concise summary of a new idea that’s been coming up in many of my interviews with entrepreneurs.
In the old economy, entrepreneurs were rewarded for their sticktoitiveness because ideas took a long time to develop and customer feedback took even longer to gauge. But online, all of that is sped up. We’d be fools to ingore the information we’re getting.
Want more on this subject?
Listen to how Tim Sykes constantly tries ideas on his site and cans the bad ones without sentiment:
http://mixergy.com/cultivating-your-personal-brand-timothy-sykes
And listen to how Roger Ehrenberg’s company might have benefited from doing this:
http://mixergy.com/launch-in-phases-the-roger-ehrenberg-interview
May 18th, 2009 at 6:56 pm
Another great interview Andrew. As usual, I really like how you bounce between interviewing people about their specific product and more generally what lessons they drew from their experience.
We tend to focus our attention on those people who, against all the odds and in the face of advice from the crowd, go it alone and achieve great success. But this is the confirmation bias at work. We conveniently ignore the far far more common story of the people who pursue such a course and bankrupt themselves, destroy a marriage, miss their kids growing up and more all for an idea that never did and never will have traction.
This whole idea of the miner who gave up just inches from the richest vein in history and all those stories fail to account for all the times the “keep going no matter what” strategy doesn't pan out.
When I was a kid I came across Waist Deep in the Big Muddy, a song written by Pete Seeger in 1963 and when people start telling me that I'm just not getting it, I always try to ask myself if whether they're just not understanding or whether I'm not getting it and I'm Waist Deep in the Big Muddy.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXnJVkEX8O4
May 25th, 2009 at 9:57 pm
Thanks Tom. Sorry about the late response. I'm just getting through my
emails today.
After doing over 150 interviews, I'm starting to see that this is a much
more common story than the “stick with it till the world knows I'm right”
approach.
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