How Can You Reduce Failures?

These series of guest posts are written by the teams attending the Tetuan Valley Startup School 2010 Spring edition.
In this post from the White Collar Game team, formed by Edin Kapic and Vanessa Estorach. You can keep up-to-date with White Collar Game progress on their blog,twitter and website

FAILURE IS GOOD. This is what we’ve listened in Tetuan Valley so many times and also, what we’ve read on the Net on some good articles such as: For Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, failure is an option, Can Failure Be Good?, How Successful Entrepreneurs Use Failure As Leverage For Future Success, The Positive Power of Failure, Don’t Fear Failure.

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OK, as a future entrepreneur I see that failure is positive BUT, how can I reduce the probability of failure of my product/service?

What are the Main Causes of an Entrepreneur Failure?

  1. Lack of planning
  2. The team
  3. Poor market knowledge
  4. Not being realistic

The list would never end. I mentioned some but YOUR OPINION IS WELCOME!

How to Avoid Failures?

First of all, you have to find an idea of a sector you know or you’re an expert of

An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.

NIELS BOHR, Danish physicist and Nobel Prize winner

As Tim Ferriss said, an expert is someone that “knows more than the purchaser”. So don’t be afraid of being informed and BECOME AN EXPERT!

Then, test your product. Tim Ferriss give us some tips in his “Micro-Test your products” (Ch. 10 – Testing the Muse):

  1. Best: Study your competitor and create a more compelling offer.
  2. Test: Test your product/service with Google Adwords or Ebay (before having the product/service finished)
  3. Divest or Invest: compare your costs with the potential sells that you’ve seen you’ll have in the Test step.

As a colophon, watch this inspirational video about the people who failed before they succeeded

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