10,000 WAYS THAT WON`T WORK

10,000

WAYS THAT WON`T WORK

By Sarah Dhafer

“Success is not about delivering a feature; success is learning how to solve customers’ problems.” – Eric Rise

Reading this quote, you might be led into a journey of ideas. You can`t deny that you have always related success with getting positive results from the first try and this might work with certain things, however, the entrepreneurship world is a world that is full of surprises and to fail doesn’t necessarily mean that you must give up. Today, the most amazing startups have come from failing at first. For this reason, I`m going to share a few stories with you to dive deep in the experiences and strategies of the world of successes, failures, and reaching the top by finding problems and fixing them.

WHO OF US DOESN’T KNOW THE STARTUP THAT TURNED INTO A LARGE INTERNATIONAL COMPANY, “AMAZON”?

Amazon started on July 5, 1994 by Jeff Bezos who founded the company from the garage of his house in Washington with the name Cadabra, which has changed to amazon.com after a few months because a lawyer misheard its original name as “cadaver”. Bezos’ creative strategy started right at the beginning of his startup by selecting the name, as he believed to be the most important thing in an industry. He selected the name after looking through a dictionary, he settled for the word Amazon because it was a place that is “exotic and different”. Additionally, a name that begins with “A” was preferred because it would probably be at the top of the alphabetized list. Bezos focused on building a strong brand and told a reporter, “there’s nothing about our model that can’t be copied over time. But you know, McDonald’s got copied. And it’s still built into a huge, multibillion-dollar company. A lot of it comes down to the brand name. Brand names are more important online than they are in the physical world.”

We might all know the story of how Amazon started but it might not be popular knowledge that Amazon needed almost 7 years to reach the point of being a profitable company, as it got its first profit in the fourth quarter of 2001 on revenues of more than 1 billion dollars. Success takes time, it’s not something that you can reach between day and night.

On the other side is a start-up that had been launched to the market but failed. This project was called “Juicero”. Juicero is a project that had a head start in Silicon Valley when it raised 120 million from investors to create a device that was marketed as a fruit and vegetable juicer but was revealed to extract juice from pre-processed packets. The company’s product was called the Juicero Press, a Wi-Fi connected device that used singleserving packets of pre-juiced fruits and vegetables sold exclusively by the company by subscription. The device was launched to the market to be sold with a price of $699. In addition to that, it forced the customers to buy the packs of juice only from the company itself as it will only work after matching the QR code of the device with the pack, the company has failed to analyze the customer need, prices, market study and feedback. Customers found that the packs are easily juiced by hand without using the highly priced device, the company decreased the price of the device until it reached $399 before the company failed due to focusing on financial profits instead of focusing on finding a problem to solve and customer service.

Juicero has since become a symbol of the absurd Silicon Valley startup industry that raises huge sums of money for non-problem problems.

The last and final subject of discussion is “Nokia”, once upon a time ago, the most prominent name in the phone industry.

WHY DID NOKIA FAIL?

Nokia did not adapt to change; when original phones had turned into smartphones however, Nokia was one of the creators of early smartphones. Yet the company could not manage with the pace of technological innovation.

Other mobile phones used the failure of Nokia`s smartphones to create something that’s more required and user friendly for customers and as a result, Nokia had high competition in the market with a lack of strategic planning, lack of vision and lack of innovation all of which account for its failure. What is important to note here is that Nokia’s failure was not the result of its own mistakes, as other competitors have used some strategies correctly, most notably Samsung. Therefore, Nokia’s failure is a combination of the mistakes made by Nokia and the successful strategies used by other brands in the market.

Nokia`s experience teaches us that initial success is not a guarantor of anything. Innovation is and will always be our best friend when thinking about startups. But with every failure we learn more, solve more and grow bigger. I’ll end this article with a few famous words of Thomas Edison: “I have not failed. I’ve just found

10,000 ways that won`t work.”