Failed startups – What one must learn!
Truthfully, you shouldn’t fear trying and failing. Some of the most notable businesspeople out there today failed miserably before they succeeded, and they’ve lived to tell the story. Here are some stories of failure from individuals who wanted to become wildly successful—and what we all can gain from their failures.
John Rampton: Hacked
John Rampton is a serial businessperson, an investor and a specialist in internet marketing. He’s also a tremendously successful online contributor, writing normally for Fortune, Entrepreneur, Mashable, Forbes, Huffington Post, Time, Inc., and TechCrunch. By any means if you read startups or entrepreneurship, you’ve likely reading something by John Rampton.
But, before he was well known for beginning business after business and making every one of them work, Rampton was hacked, and ended up in a tight spot:
“At the point I started my organization, we worked hard for 3 months developing our product. We launched in the market, everything appeared to be amazing. We were a half year into our business, with more than 15,000 clients when the unthinkable occurred: we got hacked. The programmer sent me a rundown of each email address in our system. I trembled in fear. All that I’d been working for could be destroyed.”
He took an unusual way to save his company. He gave the hacker $1,000 as reward for finding a bug in their system. The hacker kindly accepted, erased all the records, and helped us fix a gaping hole in our system. From that point forward he’s been fixing any gaps in their framework and triple checking everything. He was just 14 years of age when this occurred, so John discovered that occasionally even the youngest mind can turn into an asset. Had he approached hacking in an alternate manner, things could have been very different.
Neil Patel: Spread himself too thin
Neil Patel is the co-founder of KISSmetrics, Hello Bar, and Crazy Egg. He is a marketer, growth hacker and SEO specialist with clients like GM, NBC, Viacom and HP. Fundamentally, everybody from Entrepreneur Magazine to The Wall Street Journal recognizes him as an online marketer, top influencer and entrepreneur.
However, it took a couple of hard lessons in being spread too thin far before he truly understood how to position himself for success. As per Neil Patel, “Not spreading myself too thing was one of the biggest learning that I have got. Like other businessmen I love to do multiple things at once. But once I learned to focus all my energy time into one business, I was able to make it develop faster than all of my previous businesses.”
If you have learned anything from this piece, let it be that everybody falls flat, even the greatest names in business. The common thing they all share—beside later achieving mega success—is that they removed something from their experiences after facing their failures. Failures gives you new opportunities to learn and they might at times provide you fresh perspectives and ideas.