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Love hearing these stories...it’s enlightening to know that we are all grinders in the same battle. What separates us in the beginning from someone who has already experienced an exit or a successful business...is traction. It’s important to maintain a continuous hustle.
I had a quite a few failures....But I have always knew my limit in how much time and money I wanted to spend...except this one time!
In 2009 I launched a site called TeePaign that tried to capitalize on social movements (even though most of them I did not agree with lol). I hired a designer to create a few tee-shirt designs and built a few sample pages with e-commerce functionality for specific social issues and tried to sell them.
The idea was to try to get these leaders on board to use the site as a platform to push their issue. The selling point was they could sell their own design and raise money along with keeping the group unified with the same official shirt. Plus, people could comment on the page and the page was easily shareable. Easy peasy, I got this!
No, not really...
Who were these organizers and how the heck could I find them? They sort of emerge and you just can’t pick them out. I was a 20 something kid from Queens and had zero care or impact on social change. Frankly, I was most likely the cause of this failure lol!
The problem with the entire model was finding these people which was not easy. When I did find them, convincing them to come on board even though I cared less on what they were about. They could read right through my BS. They knew I was piggy backing on their community.
It was a bridge type business model which I absolutely learned to hate. I learned that it’s externally difficult to find people to use your site along with finding people to buy from your site.
It was tech heavy and I wasn’t very tech savvy either at the time and spent a lot of money building out a half a$$ site that didn’t function the way I wanted it.
My biggest lessons learned...
Websites (I learned enough code to get started), even with Wordpress.
I learned that building websites were a process, not an event. The site is never finished. Build the most important feature and launch with that.
I learned that I prefer to have just customers and not build something that focuses too broadly on separate parties. Some people want to build that marketplace style business but I’m not the brightest guy and it’s easier for me to focus on just customers.
This business scared the crap out of me, honestly. It was chaos every single day, every email, the site; it was just an utter disaster. I shut it down, it wasn’t for me.
Know when to quit and move on.
I had a quite a few failures....But I have always knew my limit in how much time and money I wanted to spend...except this one time!
In 2009 I launched a site called TeePaign that tried to capitalize on social movements (even though most of them I did not agree with lol). I hired a designer to create a few tee-shirt designs and built a few sample pages with e-commerce functionality for specific social issues and tried to sell them.
The idea was to try to get these leaders on board to use the site as a platform to push their issue. The selling point was they could sell their own design and raise money along with keeping the group unified with the same official shirt. Plus, people could comment on the page and the page was easily shareable. Easy peasy, I got this!
No, not really...
Who were these organizers and how the heck could I find them? They sort of emerge and you just can’t pick them out. I was a 20 something kid from Queens and had zero care or impact on social change. Frankly, I was most likely the cause of this failure lol!
The problem with the entire model was finding these people which was not easy. When I did find them, convincing them to come on board even though I cared less on what they were about. They could read right through my BS. They knew I was piggy backing on their community.
It was a bridge type business model which I absolutely learned to hate. I learned that it’s externally difficult to find people to use your site along with finding people to buy from your site.
It was tech heavy and I wasn’t very tech savvy either at the time and spent a lot of money building out a half a$$ site that didn’t function the way I wanted it.
My biggest lessons learned...
Websites (I learned enough code to get started), even with Wordpress.
I learned that building websites were a process, not an event. The site is never finished. Build the most important feature and launch with that.
I learned that I prefer to have just customers and not build something that focuses too broadly on separate parties. Some people want to build that marketplace style business but I’m not the brightest guy and it’s easier for me to focus on just customers.
This business scared the crap out of me, honestly. It was chaos every single day, every email, the site; it was just an utter disaster. I shut it down, it wasn’t for me.
Know when to quit and move on.
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