Design isn’t comfortable and business is difficult. Multiply design × business, as we are in The School of Design, and you end up with doubleplusuncomfortabledifficult (as Orwell might have put it in 1984).
The road to a successful startup isn’t an easy one, it’s surrounded on all sides by the scattered remnants of ‘failure’. 1
There are highs and there are lows, and – at the start of the journey, in particular – the lows massively outnumber the highs. The challenge is making it through the lows, digging deep and believing in yourself long enough to tip the balance in your favour, from low to high.
Look at any successful startup and you’ll hear about lows aplenty.
The one thing that ties the success stories together, however, is that every single successful founder pushed through and emerged out the other side, successful and doubtless a little wiser.
Cereal Success
Airbnb co-founders Joe Gebbia and Brian Chesky famously turned to cereal when they found themselves in a pickle. 2
Faced with mounting debts – $25,000+ of ever-accumulating credit card debt to be precise – they did what any entrepreneur would do, they invented a way out of it.
The pair created 1,000 boxes of cereal by hand and Obama Os were born. With an Obama’esque strapline – ‘Hope in every bowl!’ – they marketed the boxes as ‘Collector’s Items’ and sold them at $40 apiece, raising $30,000 and clearing their debt.
You might say they were cereal entrepreneurs.
I dare say those Obama Os were collector’s items, but I strongly suspect they’ve been consumed along the way.
The important lesson is Gebbia and Chesky didn’t give up and they emerged successful over the long run. It’s easy to walk away, it’s harder to stand your ground, but…
It’s easier to stand your ground – in the face of all the lows – when you believe what you’re doing is right.
The Truth
I believe there are invaluable lessons to be learned when you open up and share the truth, exploring what works and what doesn’t.
I’m embarking on the third week of my first ‘Sell While You Sleep’ course and I’ve learned a great deal of lessons over the last fortnight. I’m happy I shipped something, because shipping something has allowed me to learn.
Most courses – especially courses that claim to ‘change your life’, ‘unlock new income streams’ or ‘magically transform you’ – only share positive outcomes. They exclude the harsh realities, covering up when things go wrong.
Not only is that fundamentally dishonest, it also leads to people putting themselves under undue pressure, feeling like they’re a failure because they didn’t measure up.
That doesn’t reflect my values at all.
Lessons Learned
In our first fortnight of our initial cohort of 18, we’ve lost four: one didn’t have the time to do the work; one felt like the course wasn’t a good fit; one attended our first session (for free, as a favour to a friend); and one couldn’t focus because life was intervening.
What lessons has this taught me?
- I need to be clearer about the time commitment that’s expected of learners;
- I need to ensure that everyone enrolled understands that success is won over the long haul, not in the timespan of a course (this relieves the pressure); and
- if someone hasn’t paid to take a course, they don’t have a stake in it and they leave the moment it gets difficult.
There have been some positive lessons, too! Here are some heartening lessons:
- a cohort when they’re gathered in a private Slack channel can achieve incredible things when they’re in it together;
- inviting ‘outsiders’ (non-learners) in makes a massive difference; and
- every sale, no matter how small, deserves a celebration!
Design isn’t easy.
In creativity there is no right and wrong: there is no 2 + 2 = 4 certainty; instead there is 2 + 2 = 17 – wait, what?! – uncertainty.
The answers in creative disciplines depend upon instinct, and instinct can’t be measured. This inability to measure design leads, inevitably, to self-doubt, because you can never be 100% sure that what you’re doing is ‘correct’.
When we measure ourselves against others in a peer learning group we – mistakenly, for the most part – assume that everyone else has the answers nailed that’s just not true..
We are all struggling (Imposter Syndrome) and anyone who tells you otherwise is either lying to you or doesn’t themselves realise that they may be wrong (the Dunning-Kruger Effect).
Here’s what I’ve learned in a nutshell.
One thing I should have been stressing from the start of Sell While You Sleep is this: Everything is a prototype. We’re always testing and we edge forwards, one test at a time. Sometimes it’s success. Sometimes it’s failure. But…
There is no failure. There is only lesson after lesson after lesson. And every lesson takes us one step closer to success. I’m learning lessons every single day, because I’m testing ideas every single day. It’s hard, but I never expected it to be anything other than hard. Yes, it can be disheartening when a learner drops out, but I take heart in the number of learners active in our Slack channel day-in, day-out.
These pioneers are pushing at their own frontiers, they’re also making the most of a community of practice that I’m incredibly proud of. Anything I can do to help them, I will.
So, if you’re one of my learners – or you’re involved in an incubator, anywhere – don’t be too hard on yourself. You won’t find the answers in Week 1, 2 or 3. You might not find them in Week 12. That’s something I should have been stressing from our very first week.
