Atlanta Startups That Didn’t Survive

I'd have to agree with Micah that people for the most part misunderstand what failing fast means. We fail fast every day but we still have a startup that is growing at a encouraging rate. What it means is try something, make mistakes, take risks, if they don't work, adjust/change direction. Too many people see it, as Micah puts it, as if you don't get traction right away or within x months just give up. Rubbish. Success is not easy, you have to work harder and longer than you ever thought possible and sacrifice more than you thought you ever would or could to make it even close to work, and even then it doesn't pan out most of the time.

I would also agree with Josh and Micah that unfortunately the Atlanta startup community in general focuses so much (too much) on getting investment money and not on skills to actually make a real business work. Before people go ballistic, there ARE people/groups that are doing this, but in general, this has not been the focus that has been readily apparent to many of the startups here in town. Startups aren't easy and successful startups are even harder. I have to commend Josh, Loren and everyone else who seriously goes for it their due, just for trying. At the end of the day, failure is absolutely in the eye of the beholder.

Thanks for your thoughts Micah. I think your thoughts on funding are absolutely correct for a web startup in Atlanta. At some point you have to let go of the j-o-b and fully commit to the startup if you really want to make it successful.

One thing I didn't talk about in the video was the difference between company and personal failure. Yes, Blue Violin failed. However, I did not. What I learned during Blue Violin's failure (my own school of hard knocks) were skills I couldn't have learned otherwise. Those skills are being put to use in my current startup, Strategic Data Retention, building enterprise email analytics software (we're really close to making your email Inbox suck a lot less). If you try to do something innovative, at some point you're going to fail and it's part of the normal education process for entrepreneurs. In my case, I'm the only one who lost money (my seed investor was made whole.)

Thanks for being honest and sharing the suffering. All we hear about is the 1% who make it big, and they rewrite the story to make it sound like it was easy. It's not easy.

Also, I was glad to hear that "fail fast" involved a multi-year timespan in the case of Blue Violin. A lot of people think "fast" means 6 or 9 months. It's completely unreasonable to think that a company will be successful in that span of time. If you throw in the towel that quickly, you'll be failing fast forever and never have a chance of actually succeeding.

My one complaint is that you talked about seeking investors at about 5 minutes in on the video, then about 15 minutes in explained that you were bootstrapped for the most part. I think that there are a lot more people who talk about investment than there are people who have actually dealt with it. Most new web entrepreneurs should be ready to bootstrap their project 100% and finance it either with personal savings or income from another job. If you're depending on outside investors, you're probably sunk from the get-go.

Micah,

Thank you for watching the video and providing feedback. It is much appreciated.

I agree that there is always a lot of discussion in the community about investing when the topic should likely be bootstrapping. This is a good topic for some follow up videos.

Look for a format change in future videos where the topics are a little more concise.