Evan Carmichael spent months building an unlimited undo/redo feature for a biotech app at 19, only to learn customers didn't want it. He now launches cheap experiments, fails fast, and scales only what gains traction.
Questions this video answers
Evan’s biggest online failure was spending extensive time building an unlimited undo/redo feature for his first biotech software company—a complex feature that customers didn’t care about, leading to wasted resources.
Hi, I'm Evan Carmichael.
Welcome to another edition of Ask Evan. In today's episode, I'm going to answer a question from one of my forum readers, Don, who wrote in asking about failures, and he said, "As an entrepreneur, what was your biggest failure online?" So thanks for the question, Don. I think there's a lot you can learn from your own failures, but also from the failures of others, and hopefully you don't make those same mistakes. 'cause you can learn from other people's failures instead of making them yourself. I think the biggest failure online for me was when I had my first real software company. I was 19 years old, we're thinking, you know, what kind of features do we wanna build in this so we could sell it online to our customers? And one of the things we added in, the most complicated piece in the software, was the ability to do undo, redo unlimited times. So what that means basically is if you are making a mistake, you can go undo. And you can do undo again and undo again. And this is for biotechnology software, so it was really complex software, and you wouldn't think the most complicated thing in the software was to be able to do undo, redo unlimited times. Most software programs, even Word or Photoshop, whatever you're used to, will only undo a certain number of times. After that, you know, if it's 20 times, for example, then you can't do any more. For our software, you can do unlimited. So we thought, "Wow, this is such a cool feature, everyone's gonna love this, nobody else does this on the market." And as it turns out, nobody cared. Fortunately, we had enough other stuff in our software that people liked and bought and found really helpful. But the lesson there was we spent so much time working on this feature that we thought was really cool, but nobody else cared about, and we didn't take enough time listening to our customers and polling them for their feedback before going out and building our product. So since then, that's probably the biggest failure I made, and luckily, again, we still had enough other great things in our software that people wanted to buy, but that was the most complicated, time-consuming thing that we spent our time on. It could have been spent a lot more effectively. Since then, we try to do a lot of little failures. So, at evancarmichael.com now, we fail a lot. We try tons of new projects every month, and we see what sticks and what doesn't stick. Uh, I'm trying things, my team is trying things, and we encourage failure. We just try not to fail big. Uh, we try to start small in all of our projects, and then slowly build up and up and up as we see that they're getting some traction. We try not to spend a lot of money, especially at the beginning of any new project. A great example, since you guys are watching this video, is our videos. If you look back to the early, you know, first videos that we did, we first partnered up with a video production company that didn't cost us money, and then I did them on my own and didn't have nice gear, any lighting, any microphone, no stand for the camera, so things were wobbly and the material was still good, but the lighting was bad and the quality was was just really bad compared to what the videos are now. But we did that because I didn't want to spend a lot of money starting up a new project that wasn't going to be successful. So, we'll try a whole bunch of those little things and then most of them fail and then some of them will take off and do well and we'll continue to invest in them. So, the videos are one of those projects that started doing well and became fun. It was a great way to connect with our community and, and drive traffic as well. So we kept doing more and more and more. Then I invested in a microphone and lighting and a camera, a better camera and a tripod to make the videos better every time that we do it. But it could have gone nowhere, right? I could have spent all this money investing all the gear and only done 2 videos, and that's not really how you want to start projects. So we learned our lesson from that big failure. You know, listen to your customers and try to build around them. And then ongoing, try to fail small. Try to fail a lot but fail small, and hopefully you'll get a few ideas from those potential failures that do do well and you're able to build hopefully a really successful company off of them. So thanks for the question, Don. Hope that answered your question. Uh, for those of you watching, if you liked the video, please give it a thumbs up. It makes me want to do more of these videos for you guys. And if you have a question about failures or another question about your business, feel free to leave it in the comments below. I always read those and I try to answer as many as I can. So thank you and we'll see you on the next episode.
