Why failing fast is a blessing in disguise

Photo graciously CC-licensed by Flickr user behruz.

My last startup idea, I’ve determined it can be revealed, was a mobile payments startup.  We wanted to handle mobile payments by smartphone in a totally different, way faster way than anybody’s done before.  We knew our tech would work, and we hoped we’d be able to probably get a decent number of customers in the SMB space.

Then, the hammer dropped.  My co-founder’s parents called and told him he really should focus on his schooling instead of building another company (he was already on the board of a national not-for-profit).  Quite literally, the next week we found out that Techcrunch was reporting that Apple, with more credit card numbers on file than PayPal, was sniffing around a mobile payments startup called Boku.  Our entire model hinged on storing credit cards easily, and we were starting from 0 — a heck of a lot less than 500 million or however many iTunes accounts there are globally.  The news meant that while we could still enter the space, one of our least-likely “what ifs”: The “What if Google does it?” that we’d assumed they never do because it seemed small-time for them to us — came to pass.

That doesn’t mean we couldn’t have done it.  It doesn’t mean our company wouldn’t have been profitable.  But for us, it was a sign that as two small-time college kids with no funding, we were playing with the big boys in a place we didn’t want to be.

But the experience was great, and it taught me tons of lessons about who would listen to kids with ideas in Chicago, how to get things done in a co-founder relationship, and many other lessons.  In other words, entrepreneurs know about mitigating risk.  At this stage in my life, “wasted time” = gained experience, so it’s really not a waste.  Even if you’re a seasoned expert, seeing that wasted time and failing fast as a learning experience, not a true failure, can help you immensely.