Thomas Edison, the prolific American inventor, is said to have experimented with thousands of fibers before hitting upon the right type of carbon fiber to light and sustain his first commercial incandescent bulb. A lot of time wasted? Edison hardly thought so.
“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work,” he stated.
Many entrepreneurs feel that way today — you’ve got to try, fail and try again.
“Entrepreneurs are business owners/scientists. No one questions scientists trying to find cures for cancer. It is one day at a time and thousands of little experiments. You learn from each one,” explained Randall Stevens, owner of Punndit, a Lexington start-up whose app, RaceFace, lets competitive runners tag themselves and friends in photos and videos for sharing on social media.
One common mistake made by entrepreneurs is thinking they know the fertile markets.
“You’ve got to figure out if customers are willing to part with their money,” said Stevens. “The quicker you do the sooner you move on.”
In Punndit’s case, there are 28,000 timed races each year in the United States, ranging from the New York City Marathon to little weekend social runs. Stevens hasn’t quite figured it out yet, but he is working on handling the load and the marketplace.
“There must be 27,500 race directors out there. How do you get to them?” he said.
Pheeva, another fledgling Lexington start-up, is a rewards platform for online video games. It was launched in 2010 by Lafe Taylor and Lamar Wilson, who freely admit to the mistakes they made.
“When we started, we had 400 people playing on it. We focused heavily on building an HTML5 platform but then realized it wasn’t ready for mobile devices just yet. We also saw the service we were pushing to game developers may not have been something developers wanted,” Wilson said.
The problem has yet to be solved, and the pair continues to work day jobs at another local tech company, 212ths, where they write custom software applications for businesses.
“I can’t say we completely failed, because it’s still out there, but our initial hypothesis failed,” Wilson continued. “We got it wrong with HTML5. We made assumptions that developers wanted it, and it was hard to find any who did. We even offered to pay them. That’s a tell-tale sign we needed to figure out something else.”
Taylor said they got out too far on their own thoughts and beliefs.
“Test ideas. Get it in front of customers as early as possible. That’s what we learned. With Pheeva, we went on our own assumptions — what we wanted, like game rewards — but people building the games were fine with the revenue streams they already had,” he said.
Rebecca Fields, owner of a young start-up called Premier Dance, felt growing pains, too.
“Mistakes — oh, yes, there were many of those,” she said. “But it’s a learning experience.”
Fields has danced since she was two-and-a-half at studios. She attended SCAPA (School for the Creative and Performing Arts) in Lexington and had a dance minor at the University of Kentucky. After graduating, she stopped dancing and missed it.
“I realized there were many adults who grew up dancing and missed it too,” she said.
The biggest lesson Fields learned is that everyone has an opinion on how you should run your business, but every business is different and not every piece of advice applies. Also, she said, it is important to get a good mentor.
“Put yourself into a community of people who are doing similar things, like starting a business,” Fields said.
Fields did that by obtaining space at Awesome Inc., an entrepreneurial incubator for start-up tech businesses in downtown Lexington. Though her business isn’t tech-related, she has learned much from people coming and going there. “Awesome Inc. has been a huge blessing,” she said.
Another mistake Fields made was initially failing to offer the dance classes her customers really wanted, instead offering classes oriented to her favorite styles. She learned to bend to the marketplace.
Brian Rainey, co-founder of Awesome Inc., started Book Exchange, an online marketplace for textbooks, with two other Awesome Inc. co-founders while all were in college.
“We had thousands of users and thousands of transactions occurring with books being sold by vendors, but we never found enough people who would pay for the service, assuming it was free,” said Rainey.
They tried getting advertisers but couldn’t sign enough to make the business go.
“We made tons of mistakes,” Rainey said. “Our biggest one was not listening to customers about our website features. We wanted to install a course-ratings feature and one for the professors. We didn’t ask any students if they wanted it. We spent a whole semester building it, and nobody wanted it or used it — a massive waste of time and resources.”
Local entrepreneurs are so aware of the ups and downs of start-up businesses, they held a “Fail Party” recently, at which panel members shared their stories of the pitfalls of starting a new enterprise.
Sharing both failures and successes can be cathartic, and the lessons learned from other entrepreneurs can help to improve the next effort. But entrepreneurs agreed that it is important to get start-up business ideas in front of people and gather input early in the process, for better or worse.
“Get out of your development office and test, test, test,” Wilson said. “See if there’s room for your ideas to breathe.”