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Don’t fail fast. Don’t fail early. Just don’t fail.

Image Credit: Greg Epperson/Shutterstock

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One thing that has always intrigued me about Silicon Valley is how easy it is here to dismiss products, investments, and sweat with the “fail fast, fast often” mindset. Sure, it enables our experimentalist culture and fast learning. But there has to be a balance.

Headlines such as “Failing Cheaper”, “Fail Fast”, “Experiment. Fail. Learn. Repeat.” in the tech media and thought leader blogs — and even on t-shirts — encourage a culture of give-up-ism. And post-mortem articles are a new way to celebrate your failure. But some of the best companies out there, such as Google and Facebook, were created at times when their categories were discounted heavily by the time’s well-respected authorities. If they’d given up, our world would look a lot different today.

Take Facebook for instance: Before it came out as a success, Google had declared that “advertising on social networks is challenging” based on its experience partnering with MySpace. Google, itself, came out at a time when search engines were declared a no-go in terms of monetization. Today Asana and Slack are trying to emerge in the collaboration software market at a time when their older brother, 37 Signals, is still struggling with no IPO-big announcements in the horizon.

Long story short: Big ideas require time and reiteration, and giving up early, failing fast may not always be the right decision despite what the early signals look like and what the hip thought leaders/investors say. As Steve Jobs once famously said in his Stanford graduation speech, “You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.”

I’m not saying that giving up should always be out of the question. Most ideas are not that brilliant and the early signals you receive can help you assess your likelihood to succeed. There is no easy answer to the question of when and where to give up.

The “throw everything at the wall and see what sticks” method is too expensive of an experiment for most entrepreneurs, unless you’re a venture capitalist, rich entrepreneur who’s in it for a second/third round or the manager, of a corporate innovation arm.

For the rest of us, here are some turnaround patterns you may want to apply to your startup when your growth has stalled or when it is not as fast as anticipated “yet”:

1. Test and change

Change the product, make a lot of A/B tests, change the audience you’re selling to. Change and reiteration are the what startups are all about that. If you’re not making all the changes you can make in order to win, you most certainly don’t deserve it.

2. Try new platforms

Technology progresses faster than ever nowadays, and new media and platforms keep emerging. If your product can’t win on a certain medium/platform, invest your technical talent and learnings into a new one. For example, at around the same time private social networks such as Ning and Grou.ps lost the general-purpose group business to Facebook, there was a new medium (mobile) that was emerging, and Whatsapp nailed it with a simple clean product. That was certainly a missed opportunity for Ning and our own Grou.ps.

3. Apply brute force

Box.com did it, and you can do it too … if you’re a magician like Aaron Levie, and you can earn the business of very very patient, strong, courageous backers. When Box.com was readying itself for its IPO, its financial tables didn’t look good to many. Yet the backers played long term and brute-forced the growth by raising a lot of capital. That came at the expense of Levie’s control over the company, but it kept the company going with a warchest unlike any other and gave it a chance to win the market and win more enterprise customers. With enough cash, and patience, there are a lot of SaaS businesses that can win. The metrics require a lot of patience, and it is not easy to convince the investors that you can execute. Saying no to an acquisition offer certainly goes a long way though.

4. Focus

When you look at Apple’s years after Steve Jobs’ come-back, you see that what he did was reorganize the company to focus on “what was once thought” a smaller mission. Jobs leveraged used his relationship with Pixar and Apple’s technology, business development muscles, and hip user base, to focus on music, a niche overlooked by Microsoft back in the day. Then he started rolling out the bigger vision he had cultivated over his difficult years at NeXT. Now you may think “but that’s Apple, we’re talking about the turnaround of a public company here.” While that’s true, it’s also applicable to smaller companies and startups. Just take a look at your user base. What do your users do, what is the most active category in your user base, and how can you leverage your technology to serve them better? Figure out the shortest path to success for that small sample — even if that may turn off your users in other categories. Because there is nothing worse for a small company than stalling.

5. OEM your product

Tesla did it with Mercedes-Benz, and again, you may be able to do it too. It is reported that at a time when Tesla was having a hard time raising cash, it approached a bunch of car makers, and Mercedes-Benz earned certain rights to Tesla’s battery technology in return for an equity stake. In a smaller scale too, that is possible, if you OEM your product/technology to a bigger company in return for cash flow that will sustain you and give you more shots at success. The fact that it is not working as well as expected now shouldn’t mean you should burn all the investments made to date. Regardless of what the tech press tells you about investors liking people with failure experience, they like success experience more, so go for it while you can.

6. Do a full pivot

Paypal’s move from a security solution to what it is today is a good example of a full pivot. But don’t go any full-er than that (it was still payment related), and if you’re going to do this, make sure you do it very early on.

All in all, while these are some of the most basic turnaround strategies, each case is unique, and you should pave your way to success yourself. Be creative, and don’t give up easily — make sure you hit your limits. Persistence is not always a recipe for success, but at the very least, it is a virtue.

And even if you’re going to quit, do it after you make sure you’ve done everything you can to create a sustainable value.

Emre Sokullu is founder and CEO of GymGroups (formerly Grou.ps), one of the earliest companies in the private social networking space. He is also an inventor and holds patents on artificial intelligence (pattern recognition, knowledge representation, machine translation) and social networking. He initially traveled to the US to work at the Princeton University Wordnet Project, but subsequently stayed to pursue his aspirations.

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