Monday infographic: lessons learned after closing Atrium
What can we learn from a sad experience by one of the most resilient entrepreneurs around, Justin Kan?
By: Juan José Díaz, Founder & CEO of Wizdem
There’s a saying that goes: “there is no failure, one either win or learn”. I don’t remember where or when I first read it, but it has been with me for my last few years as an entrepreneur.
In the same tone, there’s another saying: “We are failing at failing. FAIL stands for First Attempt In Learning”. I believe I listened to this from one of my most admired digital mentors, Pascal Finette. But I wouldn’t bet on it.
As you see, the commonplace is clear: we should take our failures and learn from them. Of course, it makes sense, but it is not an easy task. Failure hurts, failure points out those mistakes we’ve made on the way. No-one starts a journey looking to fail, it is not a destination. It is an accident, one that we can leverage. But an accident nonetheless.
I have a very large set of failures. Maybe the funniest one is that when I tried to start my first company and miscalculated the costs. A noob mistake that killed the company when the third client arrived: we were soo successful we died. Dang it!
That’s why I found admirable the Twitter feed that inspired this infographic. Justin Kan is an entrepreneur I’ve been following for the past couple of years or so. I find him interesting, provocative and brilliant. When I knew about Atrium I was mega hyped, I actually used one of their free tools, the Investor Research Spreadsheet, when started the angel round for Wizdem.
And then it failed. And Justin shared what he learned in a candid thread:
Trying to dive deeper on each learning I came up with this list of resources that I hope are helpful:
Start with the mission:
Simon Sinek proposes the framework “start with why” https://simonsinek.com/product/start-with-why/
Start remote:
Team communication: tandem.chat
Video calls: around.co
A provocative essay by James Currier (@JamesCurrier): https://www.nfx.com/post/where-to-build-your-next-startup/
Don’t skip the R&D phase:
I don’t have any good resources I’ve personally used or tried. Any suggestions?
Don’t build services companies:
I don’t have any good resources I’ve personally used or tried. Any suggestions?
Work on things you have intrinsic motivation:
Dan Pink, “The puzzle of motivation”: https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_the_puzzle_of_motivation/transcript
Dan Sullivan, 4C’s: https://resources.strategiccoach.com/quarterly-books/the-4-cs-formula
Alison Berman, “The Motivating Power of a Massive Transformative Purpose”: https://singularityhub.com/2016/11/08/the-motivating-power-of-a-massive-transformative-purpose/
The more people you have, the harder is to turn the ship:
Dan McGinn, “Build a quick and nimble culture”: https://hbr.org/2014/01/build-a-quick-and-nimble-culture
If you lack product-market fit money rarely will solve it:
Ann Miura-Ko, “True Product Market Fit is a Minimum Viable Company”: https://medium.com/swlh/true-product-market-fit-is-a-minimum-viable-company-56adeb3e49cd
Sarah Tavel, “Measuring Happy GMV, and why I’m over Net Promoter Score”: https://sarahtavel.medium.com/measuring-happy-gmv-and-why-im-over-net-promoter-score-47a5748611bc
Rahul Vohra, “How Superhuman Built an Engine to Find Product/Market Fit”: https://firstround.com/review/how-superhuman-built-an-engine-to-find-product-market-fit/
CEO’s can’t delegate being in the trenches:
I don’t have any good resources I’ve personally used or tried. Any suggestions?
Who are we building for:
Ideo, “Human-Centered Design Kit”: https://www.ideo.com/post/design-kit
Frame strategy and communication:
Heath, Chip. Heath, Dan. “Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and others die”: https://heathbrothers.com/books/made-to-stick/
Avoid fake markets:
I don’t have any good resources I’ve personally used or tried. Any suggestions?
Make the iteration time faster:
Eric Ries, “The Lean Startup”: http://theleanstartup.com/book
Culture is set early and it’s really hard to change:
Paul Michelman, “The end of corporate culture as we know it”: https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/the-end-of-corporate-culture-as-we-know-it/
Ed Catmull, “Pixar, Inc.”: https://www.creativityincbook.com/about/
Erin Meyer, “The culture map”: https://erinmeyer.com/books/the-culture-map/
Alberto De Legarreta, Emilia Kiehnle, Itzia Quetzeri, y Juan José Díaz. “Company Culture Map (in Spanish):
If you have any suggestions, I’d love to add them and share them with our community! Feel free to tell me about them in a comment below:
Finally, I want to gather as much experience from our community and build a map of learnings around fails we’ve experienced. I opened a Brainstorm where you can share your stories of failure and what have you learned from them, just follow this link: https://wizdem.io/convocatorias/f/fail_and_learn
And as always, I’m looking forward to hearing from you! Reach me easily at: