Failing is inevitable, every once in a while. Fail well. Fail successfully!

By Niranjan Rao

It would be difficult to come across anyone who hasn’t failed ever – at anything, or even anyone who doesn’t know what it means. And yet so many times we get hassled by this familiar experience, instead of leveraging it. Embrace it, leverage it and by all means celebrate failure, because it precedes luck, success and happiness most times. Failure also draws us closer to the truth, that we’re mortals; draws us closer to God and brings in humility and builds character.

This applies to business, as much as it applies to anything else in one’s life. We’re consciously trying to build this into the culture of our still budding company by acknowledging failure when it happens and rewarding in some form, quick failures.

For failing quickly could save us a lot of time and money, so we can then fail somewhere else, until we figure what works. We’re still working on the stigma attached to failure, to remove the negative connotation and bring in a positive one.

Still in our early days, we failed seemingly well a couple of times at www.weown.in. First, we built this Minimum Viable Product (MVP) for an online platform that enables ‘shared ownership’ and presented it to a mixed audience. The message was rather loud. We quickly learnt we may have been ahead of time here, took learnings and added ‘group buying’ to supplement the ‘shared ownership’ way of buying high value goods/ services. Now, this combined model that enables a group of people to buy one thing each (group buying) or a group of friends to buy one (say, a farmhouse or invest in property) jointly and share ownership, is working pretty well.

Second, we attempted tying up with popular clubs for the New Year celebrations recently, and boy did we fail. We acknowledged it, did a quick analysis of why ‘when we could help people save money on their “high value purchases”, we can’t on party tickets’. We’re now smarter on what we attempt.

We will not stop taking shots at newer and seemingly crazy ways of doing things, and will encourage others to do that, where we can. Here’s the reasoning: If we succeed only on 10% of all our ideas, and if the cost of each failure can be kept below 1/10th of a successful one, we’re in business! Only, we want to increase our probability (and control costs of failing) through failing well, failing quickly and failing successfully.

About The Author:

Niranjan Rao Reddyshetty

Niranjan is the co-founder and Managing Director of www.WeOwn.in. He is an engineer and also holds a Post Graduate Diploma in Business Administration. He worked in leadership roles with Aon, IBM and FirstSource for about 16 years before starting up a new online platform for people to buy & share together. He writes his own blog @ www.lifeandallthings.com and can be reached through email on [email protected]