Chapter 6: Starting Up, Learn from Failure

 So you have a great idea. Be it digital, physical, or a type of service, everything has to start somewhere.

There's a couple of routes you can take, whether you choose to start a small business or get investors for a large company, you always need to start at the beginning.

Sometimes, your idea becomes a startup - a new business starting operations that has the opportunity to grow to great proportions.

But I am not here to tell you what the best way to begin a startup, rather, I am recommending to research past companies that tried to start and failed. The best way to learn what not to do is to experience, but fortunately for us, we have the internet to learn about failures before we experience them. One really good example of a bad startup is from a documentary directed by Jehane Noujaim and Chris Hegedus. The documentary is appropriately titled "Startup.com", and takes you on a journey with the company called govWorks. 


I am going to spoil much of the documentary as I talk about our two protagonist, so I recommend you pause reading here before we begin.

Kaleil Isaza Tuzman, Tom Herman, and Chieh Cheung founded govWorks.com, which was a website designed to let people pay off their parking tickets, taxes, and other government affiliated dues. Early in the beginning, it was plagued with arguments, lack of future planning, and poor management. One founder, Chieh Cheung, separated from the group, but demanded money for the amount of time and work put into the company. He had a settlement of 700,000 dollars by the end, and walked away before the business really took off. Once the startup began to take steam, it became a full throttle train on a path to destruction. Isaza Tuzma was the CEO, who mostly managed the financial work and business operations. Tom Herman, a co-CEO, was the manager over the development teams, even though he lacked experience. The biggest issues that eventually lead to the downfall of the company was that they tried to grow too fast, didnt execute plans accurately, and were not truly ready to launch. Along with those issues, there was a lack of communication, poor management from both Isaza and Tom, and fumbling around with a website that wasnt meeting client expectations. Each founder struggled in there own way when it came to running the company. Isaza failed to communicate appropriately with his managers, and had an intense push towards growth when the rest of the team was not ready. Tom failed to understand business operations, and lacked experience crucial for running a development team and managing multiple assets. Together with all of the glaring issues, the company failed just around a year. Every step along the way for these founders was filled with poor decisions, and each member was unable to learn from their failures to improve themselves during the run of the company.

The point of this story is to show how quickly a good idea can lead to a bad outcome. Every idea needs careful planning, and time to formulate a proper business model. Even when you feel rushed to get an idea out ahead of competition, its important to remind ourselves that haste doesn't always mean success. With careful planning, strong team communication, and expertise advice, anyone can become a good innovator.


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