Matt Paulson talks about handling business failure. He's had 13 to 15 failed projects himself and says people only see Mark Cuban's wins, not his losses. Treat failure as a stepping stone, focus on what makes your product different, and learn that marketing and operations are harder than most founders expect.
13–15 projects
$15,000
AdSense
Everyone, this is Matthew Paulson and I wanted to talk to you guys a little bit about business failure and what that really looks like. I think there's a disconnect that people that compare themselves to other entrepreneurs, I don't feel like we're ever making a fair comparison. Typically you are only comparing yourself with somebody that has had some success. So you look at yourself and you compare yourself to somebody who has had a successful business. So I might compare myself to somebody like Mark Cuban and say, oh, look at this guy. He built a billion dollar business. He sold Yahoo. He bought this awesome sports team, he's on Shark Tank, he's doing all this really cool stuff. What you really don't see when making that comparison is that he's had a lot of failures along the way. Broadcast.com, which he sold. Yahoo wasn't his first business. He had failures before that. Even after he made all this money, he bought landmark theaters, which didn't go all that well for him. So it's like, you look at this guy, he has this supposedly great resume. It is a great resume, but you don't really see the failure that happens. I think it's important to recognize that entrepreneurs, even the ones that are successful, and you could say, I'm successful or not, I've had a lot of failure. I counted 13, 14, 15 projects that have failed just miserably. And everybody that I know that has had a successful business, it's come after trying like 10 different things that didn't work. So if you are on your first or second business and just not working out, you're not getting the traction that you want. It's okay. Most small businesses do fail after one, two, three or four or five years. And it's not because that the entrepreneur is a failure. It is because the business is a failure. So just because you have business failure does not mean you don't have the capacity to be a successful entrepreneur. I think most people that have that drive to start a business and are really willing to work for it can make it happen. But, you know, typically it's not. On your first business, you generally just don't know enough to. You don't know. You don't know what it takes to start a business. When you first try, you think, okay, I'm going to make a product, I'm going to sell it, I'm going to use this sales channel. And what ends up happening is you just don't end up doing enough stuff to make your business succeed. And then your first business fails and Then your second business, you say, okay, I know I should have done this, this and this better on my first business. Or you do those extra things, then it kind of works. And then maybe your third or your fourth business, you actually have some of that success that you are finally looking for because by then you really know that. You really know what it takes to start a business. You need a good product. You need something that's differentiated, something that is not identical to what everyone else is selling. You need to have actual marketing channels. Word of mouth is not a marketing channel. That's typically not going to get you customers. You need to do advertising or marketing or promotion in some way get your business off the ground. And people underestimate the amount of work that marketing and operations is when they're starting their first business. So I just want to encourage you guys that if you're failing right now, Don't let that get you down. Because people that are successful have failed too. You just don't see it on their LinkedIn profile. You don't see it on your resume. If you go to mattpolson.com, you look at my resume or you go to my LinkedIn profile, you don't see the 15 businesses and business ideas that I've tried that have failed and haven't worked because you just don't put those things down because you have a LinkedIn profile to impress people. You don't have it to say, hey, look at me, I'm a failure. So those types of things just don't make it on there. I like to use the quote that you should never compare your day to day life to somebody's highlight reel. And, you know, a LinkedIn profile or, you know, a resume, it really is a highlight reel. It's, here's the best things I have to say about myself. You know, I've got these great few businesses. I've got a beautiful wife and a couple of great kids, go to a great church. You don't see all the stuff that's harder about, know, my life or somebody else's life. And, you know, I've got a lot of good stuff going on, but there are certainly challenges to, you know, medical stuff. And, you know, I've had business failures even in the last year. You know, I bought a website list, website and email list for 15 grand and it turned out to be almost useless. My biggest advertising revenue source, Adsense, just doesn't quite do what it used to. So now I have to find a new way to monetize my web traffic and Just stuff like that. Entrepreneurs have setbacks. Sometimes it's a total business failure. Sometimes part of your business just doesn't do as good as it used to be. And that's part of the game. So if you're failing right now, I just want to encourage you guys, that's okay. It's okay to fail. It's okay to have setbacks. Everybody's going to have setbacks, even the most successful people. So I just encourage you guys to keep pushing on through and recognize that just because part of your business failed or your business failed or something just didn't work, that doesn't mean you're a failure. It just means that one thing didn't work. So keep on trying, keep your head high, get some encouragement from people that have had some success and just say, hey, this one thing might not have worked, but you know something else is going to. And you might think that because my current business idea failed, nothing is ever going to work. But what we. We can't see the future. We don't see that there's this awesome marketing strategy like a month down the line that we're going to figure out, or we're going to come up with this great business idea three months from now. We don't see that future. We only kind of see what reality is right now. So I really think there is a better tomorrow for people that are facing business failure today. I've had businesses that have failed. I've had stuff that just didn't work out because I was able to set those things aside and focus on something else. I was able to build a successful business with that. Think of failure as a stepping stone to success. If you're failing right now, just keep on trying. You'll get there.
