5 SUCCESSFUL STARTUPS THAT FAILED & WHAT YOU CAN LEARN FROM THEM

It sometimes seems like every entrepreneur’s big bugaboo: failure. The fear of failing stirs up worry and, too often, stops people from ever trying to start their own business at all.

It’s not a crazy concern. There are so many startups that fail, that you never hear about. Many startups–even some with thousands of users and hundreds of thousands of dollars–fail to such an extent that they’re pushed out of business. Fear of failure has long been an important and widely discussed topic among entrepreneurs.

We’ve written about the fear of failure in past blog posts, so I want to take a different tack this time. Failure is as varied as the clothes on a long rack at your local thrift shop: some entrepreneurs fail big, others make minor mistakes, and there’s a whole line of hand-me-down coats and pants and shirts in between. Failure comes in all shapes and sizes.

WHAT WILL YOU GET FROM THIS POST?
In this post, we’ll hear directly from five successful entrepreneurs about how they have dealt with failure in their ventures. I reached out to these folks and secured exclusive interviews, large portions of which I’ve included below. The post will also cover the actionable advice that you can draw from the experiences of our interviewees.

Here are the five businesspeople I had the pleasure of talking with:

• Nayeem Hussain co-founded Keen Home, a company that creates hardware and software to improve people’s homes.
• Pippin Williamson launched Pippin’s Plugins, through which he sells add-ons that he has developed for the WordPresscontent management system.
• Megan Cox co-founded Wink Natural Cosmetics to sell an all-natural eyelash-growth formula that she and her co-founder created while studying at MIT.
• Tim Hwang is among the three co-founders of FiscalNote, a real-time legal analytics platform that has received over $18 million in investment.
• Dan Norris co-founded WP Curve, which sells unlimited WordPress website support to customers who pay a monthly fee.

Each one of these entrepreneurs came with awesome insight, so it’s well worth your time to read this full post. I’ll also highlight the key takeaways in each section in case you’re pressed for time.

(Note that I added all of the bold emphasis in the interview excerpts.)

Read the whole article here

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