Coming to Terms with Failure

Part of my daily routine after failing at my first startup recently has been listening to Gary Vee. I started this initiative to get social media marketing tips however, he started to school me about business in general. Gary’s most powerful messages, in my opinion, has always been “figure out who you are”, “double down on your strengths” and “stop complaining”. When reflecting as to why my first startup failed I realized that all these sayings from Gary actually played a large part in why I failed. Below are some examples as to why those statements speak directly to me in failing at my own business and how these failures will help me as I embark on a new startup journey. Hopefully, those looking to start their own business will learn from my mistakes. Before I get into the examples I would just quickly mention that the business I wanted to create was a repository for Caribbean music that would be used for private listening and broadcast by businesses in their storefronts. Eventually becoming a platform where persons can book artists for live performances.

While I understand who I am as a person, how I wanted to present myself to the public wasn’t exactly the best way especially in the music industry. I was overly professional and I am not speaking in terms of writing formal documents. I am speaking about presenting myself, my vision and my product. On stage instead of showcasing the fun and emotion that music can bring, I instead showcased the boring formal part of the industry, the part very few cared about. This hindered the customer from emotionally connecting with my product thus it became “just another streaming music platform” instead of being “the music platform to showcase Caribbean culture”. It was entirely my fault that I didn’t trust myself enough when it came to marketing my vision for the industry.

I am an aggressive person, I aggressively pursue everything in life regardless of the scenario. However, I wasn’t aggressive enough in getting supporters for my product, whether it was on social media, in person or in talks with potential investors. My aggression was substituted for “professionalism”. This gave the impression that I was shy and lacking confidence, which doesn’t help persons being emotionally invested in my product. It definitely didn’t help when it came to investors going into their pockets to help fund my vision.

Trinidad and Tobago’s music industry isn’t well developed. However, even though I knew this I assumed many aspects of the industry would quickly change as there would now be a product that would add significant value to the industry and that in itself would drive change. Of course, this didn’t happen and I complained constantly. The complaining wasn’t that bad once I was dedicated to working towards having these changes made. The complaining became an issue when it affected my work ethic and my mood. I slowly became someone who constantly complained and did nothing to solve their grievances. This led to bad eating habits and a general unhealthy livelihood.

Am I saying that if I didn’t fall into these traps that my product would be a success? No, there are several other factors that lead to my product failure. These factors are lack of funding, a weak initial product with user issues and the long period of time it took to solve those user issues.
These lessons learned from my failures will forever be remembered and I hope it also helps you in your future endeavors. Having said that, it is now time to stop reflecting and start working on my new venture which I will write about in my next article.

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