The Failure of Success

I was walking through New York City today on my way to the office thinking about my latest web project, http://Triberr.com. In just over 2 weeks the site has hit the 100 member mark. My last big project http://fluttrs.com took over 6months to reach that and my first project http://textreminders.net took over a year.

 

Now don’t get me wrong. 100 members in two weeks is a great start in my opinion, but it’s not exactly something you can retire off of. I think it’s got potential to make some good money, but that’s what I thought about textreminders and fluttrs as well. Neither of those sites generated any revenue at all despite MASSIVE amounts of my time being invested. In fact, they were both failures in just about every sense of the word… except one. Experience.

 

I learned a LOT building textreminders. Before that site I had no idea how to program, didn’t know how to work with databases, didn’t know the difference between a shared, dedicated and cloud hosting provider, didn’t know about site security and many other things I learned the hard way. At the end of the day two years the site had over 5,000 members and a massive, bloated site structure which I blew up and converted to a 1 page site.

 

Then there was fluttrs. Building on my new found programming skills I set out to build a video sharing platform. I learned about on-site video recorders, content delivery networks, optimizing video for search engines and social features like following other members. It was a difficult, expensive website to build of which I’ve lost several thousands of dollars, but I gained two things. More experience and several valuable contacts.

 

One of those contacts that thought Fluttrs was a great concept was @dino_dogan. He liked the idea of online communication being more video focused, and we soon become good friends. Shortly after he came to me with an idea for a site that helped manage the relationships bloggers have with each other – enter Triberr.

 

Triberr is off to a great start and has a clear monetization path. It’s too early to call it a success, but there are early indicators that we’ve gotten things right this time. I truly believe it’s a combination of my past web dev experience, my past addition to World of Warcraft, Dino’s strong relationships with other bloggers and a shared vision on how to solve a need for serious bloggers.

That was some lengthy background for this single thought:

You cannot separate failure from success. Success is the combination of what is working, and what has not worked previously. Since you would not have your success without those past failures, those failures are part of your success – making them successes in and of themselves.