10th #PNMeetup – Lessons learnt from Failed Product Startups

“Our Greatest Glory is not in never failing but in rising up every time we fail”

Do you know some of the top founders which failed multiple times to then make it big….

– His first product was a rice cooker that sold no more than 100 units – Do you know who it was – Akio Morita, Founder Sony
– He had over 51 failures on start ups – Do you know who it was – Peter Vesterbacka, CMO of Rovio Entertainment before the Angry Birds
– He had over 4 big failures – Do you know who it was – Max Levchin Founder Pay Pal

Failures! Most of the time we just try to ignore this or the facts/ events associated with it. Right? Because we always listen or like to listen about success stories, have you ever heard that someone is loudly saying about failure stories? Failure is considered a taboo in most of our countries, hence people are afraid to fail and the ones that do, hate talking about it. Yet it is only through failure that we can understand the real lessons in success by fostering a culture of innovation where people are comfortable to try out new ideas, take calculated risks, be a little unreasonable, and celebrate failure by providing a place where you are comfortable to share and learn from the experiences of entrepreneurs and failed startups.

You know most of the startups fail in their very early stage. Because due to lack of experiences and insights they never get the bigger picture and they break down after initial failures.

But if from the early stage, they get a chance to interact with veterans who have seen several failures closely in their journey and overcame them, then talking with those people and listening to them will create a huge impact.

And who knows from those failed ideas you may found out your real idea by analysing deeply after getting insights/ suggestions.

In this #PNMeetup we bring 2 such founders to share their story

1) Sandeep Sahi – CEO, Syncapse Group

Syncapse Corp., a Toronto-based social media marketing management company, was regarded as an international leader in the social media marketing industry. The company offered a wide array of social media marketing solutions, including consulting and strategy, measurement and analytics, social and search advertising, engagement automation and training.

The company raised a staggering $45-million, had offices in Toronto, London, New York, and India, boasted a client roster that included some of the world’s largest corporations, was honoured with Facebook’s preferred marketing developer designation and was considered an international thought leader in social media marketing. Clients included Coca-Cola, JP Morgan Chase, Johnson & Johnson, Anheuser Busch-InBev, Amway, and L’Oreal, to name just a few. So when the company filed for bankruptcy, laying off 154 staff members in the process, many were left wondering how the most promising name in the industry could have met such an abrupt end.

2) Piyush Gupta – Founder, RouteGuru

RouteGuru was born to solve people’s regular hassle in finding places intuitively. The team pioneered the “Textual Landmark based driving directions” technology.

RouteGuru.com was launched in June 2007 as a web application for finding landmark intelligent and practically usable driving directions. RouteGuru’s direction generation algorithm relied heavily on features that were conceived and implemented for the Indian scenario e.g. use of landmarks like overhead tanks, important buildings, institutes, flyovers; use of ‘Nth turn at the roundabout’ in combination with the road name etc.

RouteGuru was bootstrapped with an investment of about Rs. 50 Lakhs over survival duration of 3 years. Won some big awards (monetarily) to keep it going. Survived two acquisition offers within 6 months of its launch. Appreciated by Google on their APAC blog. Piyush was chosen by Institute For The Future (Stanford) as the South Asian Steward to lead their global initiatives. Mid 2009, Lost a major Telco-deal that led to turning away from a term sheet. Nov 2009, the team decided to quit despite reasonable revenues to draw modest salary and an approved grant from DST.

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Failures have also a great impact on our journey to success. If you are a startup founder or entrepreneur then taking lessons from each failures make a rock solid base for your future.

You can RSVP your participation here