My first business sold for millions. And my second business was a flop.
I started that second business like we all do. I was excited. I couldn’t wait to get started.
I’d studied books like The Lean Startup, and hey, my last business did really well.
So I was feeling positive and energized by my new idea: an event invitation site.
But in the end, the site failed. I lost $300,000, and months of time.
And get this: my wife was unknowingly using my competitor’s product!
Ouch.
So what went wrong?
I traced it back to what happened with my friend Jon…
Jon was a buddy of mine who held a lot of events. He was the perfect guy to talk to about my invitation site. He even used Evite and complained about it.
“I CAN ASK JON FOR FEEDBACK!” I thought.
I mean, that’s what we’re taught to do right? That’s The Lean Startup methodology. Talk to users. Build what they really want, not what you imagine they want.
Everyone and their cofounder KNOWS to do this. And I even had the ideal person to talk to. But I didn’t talk to Jon.
Instead, I built the site, hoping that people would somehow “discover” it, THEN judge me.
(They’d love it, of course. Techcrunch would call me a genius, I’d be on the cover of Forbes…the rest would be history…)
Only, you know how it turned out. It bombed.
In fact, when my wife sent out an online invitation to MY birthday party, she used Evite.
I said, “Baby, why are you using Evite and not my site?”
She said, “Your site is an invitation site?”
Man. I didn’t even explain my idea to MY OWN WIFE.
So how in the heck does this happen?
Why did a guy who was capable, who knew what he SHOULD be doing, end up crashing and burning so hard?
Believe me, no one wanted answers more than me.
So I set out to get them.
And what I discovered was not at all what I thought I’d find…
I’ll tell-all in Part 2!