Ever had a startup that failed? Well done!

Success in Failure (SIF) is a new series we’re going to be running at TechNation Australia. There are 2 goals for SIF

1. Destigmatise failure. I mean, how are you supposed to get better if you don’t try and fail?
2. Pass on lessons learned from each others’ failures

The plan is simple, to get local tech entrepreneurs to explain what they were trying to do, why they failed and the lessons learned along the way.

Stories should be short and sweet (i.e. less than 1000 words) and lessons learned must, of course, be included. Other than that there’s no real structure - everyone is free to tell their own story of failure their own way.

If you’ve started up and failed and want to share what you learned along the way, drop me an email at editor@technation.com.au with your story and we’ll add it to the collection.

The person with the honour of kicking off SIF is Scott Middleton.

Scott Middleton is an individual with a passion for ideas and opportunities. Scott is the founder of infome, a startup that makes your life easier and more enjoyable by getting to know you and the world around you. An example of how infome helps with the little things in life is pickmylunch.com.au.

Take it away, Scott…

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The 7 Lessons Learnt From Letting Donttell.com.au Expire

Almost a year ago from now I launched the second version of donttell.com.au. It was to be Australia’s number 1 location for Australian street fashion and outfits. It never made it.

This week the domain for donttell.com.au expired and the decision was made not to renew it. That is I’ve decided that donttell.com.au should come to an end.

Here are some lessons you can take away from my failure with donttell.com.au:

1. You need to be 2010% passionate about what you’re doing. Whilst I was passionate about creating something that people loved to use, I wasn’t passionate enough about the actual purpose of the donttell.com.au. I really couldn’t get passionate about gladiator sandals, no matter how hard I tried.
2. Focus your product/service on a specific need. The first version of donttell.com.au was launched almost 2 years ago. It was a mess of features and “stuff” and “things” and … It just didn’t have focus. Your focus needs to be something that people immediately look at and say “Oh I get it” - only then can you hope for growth and usage. Take a look at pickmylunch.com.au for an example of this.
3. Focus on how you will bring people to your site. You need to put a strategy in place for bringing people to the site before you build the site or service. The reason for this is that by asking “how will I get people to my service?” you inevitably end up asking “why will people come to my site?” which not only helps you focus but gives you the exact information for what you should be building your site around and the advertising you need to do. If your site is built to draw people to it, then it will. With donttell.com.au we eventually focused on fashion trends, creating content with the exact title of the trend and running advertising campaigns around that.
4. Advertising is a must. Naively thinking that your service will just take off like there is no tomorrow because everyone thinks it is great and tells their friends is cods waddle. Ain’t going to happen. It doesn’t matter how great it is because how can someone tell their friends about something if they don’t know it exists?
5. Focus on bringing people back to your site. Donttell.com.au had a mailing list that bought people back to the site. This list had an exceptionally high conversion rate compared to most mailing lists. Once you’ve spent all that time and effort drawing someone to your site, you need to spend more time and effort getting them to stay.
6. Keep it simple. Transforming donttell.com.au from a feature list like “A social fashion site where you can upload outfits and share them with your friends, rate them, buy them…” to “Australian street fashion and outfits” made a big difference. Keep it simple.
7. Get other people involved. You’ll be surprised at how many people really want to take on an exciting “extra curricula” project. Almost everyone has the itch, they just need to be pointed in the right direction. Donttell.com.au was lucky to become the outlet for some very creative people.

There are other little lessons learnt along the way, but these were by far the most important. It’s because of these lessons that it is hard for me to be upset about this coming to an end. I’ve just learnt so much from it.

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A massive “Thank You” to Scott for having the balls to go first and for passing on the lessons he’s learned. A big thanks to Mick Liubinskas as well, for being an advocate of startup failure (even though he and Phil do so well at preventing it, at Pollenizer) and for unwittingly doing market research for SIF by running Elevator Fail sessions at Growth Town

Remember - if you have a fail story you want to share, just email me and we’ll get the story up.