Hello all,
As said in the title, I failed again on a project. I have hesitated a lot before writing this post but I thought this might be interesting to share that here for other people to learn from my mistakes.
Just a little background on me first: I am 28, living in the UK. Have a job in order to pay the bills and have constant money coming in for investing in my business. My job is good enough in the way that I can arrange the hours I have to be at the office so I am able to work from 5:30 am to 3:30 pm and then back home I can still work 6 to 7 hours every day plus my weekends on my project.
That being said, I started a progress thread here a few months ago to share what I was doing and get advice on what I was planning to do. The market has been confirmed and the project has come a long way but today, I have to admit that I have to stop it. So why do I stop it? Very simple, ONE main cause and this really is the source of all the problems I have had: I have not prepared the project properly enough before launching it.
Consequences:
1- I cannot get a customer to pay for my product
2- I have a prototype that is not operating exactly the way it must do to fulfil my customers' needs
3- I have already invested quite a lot of money in this project
4- I would need to invest much more money than what I already have in order to get all the problems fixed and I can no longer afford it
What I have learnt:
This process has not have only bad consequences.
- I have personnally evolved more in these few months that I have done for a long time (last time I had this feeling was when I decided to go out of my comfort zone and move to the UK)
- In terms of mentality and personnality, some deep changes have taken place as well. I still fear failing but this does not prevent me from investing money to develop what I want. I have never been procrastinating because of the fear of failure, my procrastination usually rather come from the fear of loosing the little money I had.
- I have learnt a lot businesswise during all this project. I have been working on several small projects for more that a year and a half now and I can really see the evolution since I started, even when I worked on stupid projects I would never go into now (but that is my view now).
But the biggest lesson to remember here and if there is only one single thing to remember from this already too long post, that is:
ASK YOU ALL THE GOOD QUESTIONS BEFORE STARTING.
That is what I have seen in some threads called "do your due diligence". It is very important to ask you the good questions from the beginning. It is hard to admit it from me and even more publicly here but if I failed it is because of this: I didn't do my due diligence on my project or at least not properly and I can assure you that it costed me all my money. Would I have do that from the beginning, I would have realised that what I needed to invest was too large an amount of money for what I could afford and I would not have gone in it so fast. But I was too eager to start, I guess I didn't want to see all the problems I was going to face or maybe I was thinking not objectively enough and didn't want to see that what I wanted to do was not good enough... there is a lot of reasons why but the consequences of all of them are the same.
The good point here is that the market exists and that this project is not really dead. I will be able to retake it later if the need still exists when I have more money to invest.
And second good point here is that I know what not to do now and have started a new project. I am currently doing my due diligence and you can all be sure that I will do that to the best I possibly can.
That is all I can say so far. I may start a new progress thread for my new project soon. Sorry for this very long post. I now have something interesting for people to learn from so this is my way to give back to this forum for all the good stuff I have learnt from it.
As said in the title, I failed again on a project. I have hesitated a lot before writing this post but I thought this might be interesting to share that here for other people to learn from my mistakes.
Just a little background on me first: I am 28, living in the UK. Have a job in order to pay the bills and have constant money coming in for investing in my business. My job is good enough in the way that I can arrange the hours I have to be at the office so I am able to work from 5:30 am to 3:30 pm and then back home I can still work 6 to 7 hours every day plus my weekends on my project.
That being said, I started a progress thread here a few months ago to share what I was doing and get advice on what I was planning to do. The market has been confirmed and the project has come a long way but today, I have to admit that I have to stop it. So why do I stop it? Very simple, ONE main cause and this really is the source of all the problems I have had: I have not prepared the project properly enough before launching it.
Consequences:
1- I cannot get a customer to pay for my product
2- I have a prototype that is not operating exactly the way it must do to fulfil my customers' needs
3- I have already invested quite a lot of money in this project
4- I would need to invest much more money than what I already have in order to get all the problems fixed and I can no longer afford it
What I have learnt:
This process has not have only bad consequences.
- I have personnally evolved more in these few months that I have done for a long time (last time I had this feeling was when I decided to go out of my comfort zone and move to the UK)
- In terms of mentality and personnality, some deep changes have taken place as well. I still fear failing but this does not prevent me from investing money to develop what I want. I have never been procrastinating because of the fear of failure, my procrastination usually rather come from the fear of loosing the little money I had.
- I have learnt a lot businesswise during all this project. I have been working on several small projects for more that a year and a half now and I can really see the evolution since I started, even when I worked on stupid projects I would never go into now (but that is my view now).
But the biggest lesson to remember here and if there is only one single thing to remember from this already too long post, that is:
ASK YOU ALL THE GOOD QUESTIONS BEFORE STARTING.
That is what I have seen in some threads called "do your due diligence". It is very important to ask you the good questions from the beginning. It is hard to admit it from me and even more publicly here but if I failed it is because of this: I didn't do my due diligence on my project or at least not properly and I can assure you that it costed me all my money. Would I have do that from the beginning, I would have realised that what I needed to invest was too large an amount of money for what I could afford and I would not have gone in it so fast. But I was too eager to start, I guess I didn't want to see all the problems I was going to face or maybe I was thinking not objectively enough and didn't want to see that what I wanted to do was not good enough... there is a lot of reasons why but the consequences of all of them are the same.
The good point here is that the market exists and that this project is not really dead. I will be able to retake it later if the need still exists when I have more money to invest.
And second good point here is that I know what not to do now and have started a new project. I am currently doing my due diligence and you can all be sure that I will do that to the best I possibly can.
That is all I can say so far. I may start a new progress thread for my new project soon. Sorry for this very long post. I now have something interesting for people to learn from so this is my way to give back to this forum for all the good stuff I have learnt from it.
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