At K&J Growth, potential startup customers come to us with seemingly the same story every time.

“We are almost done with our product (or we have our beta, or have a creative idea) and we want to GROW.”

Grow is in caps because that’s where the emphasis is.

But we dig a little deeper, “does that mean you want… a hundred new customers (or downloads)?”

Surprisingly, this is where their thought process has usually stopped.

So instead of working backward from their end goal, they look around at what everyone else is doing and aim to place themselves high on the totem pole.

“A million downloads in a year” - probably the most common goal I hear from apps.

Every time, my head spins with the question, “why?”

I don’t ask because I already know: They don’t know.

The other things they don’t know? It’s almost bound to fail.

Not the marketing of course, we can get them the customers or downloads they want. That’s actually the easy part.

But users are fleeting. A great product can often have a customer lifecycle of 1-2 years.

Their untested, unrefined, unoptimized, fresh baby of a product? It’s more likely somewhere between 1-2 days. And I’m not exaggerating. Getting someone to open an app once is hard. Getting someone to open an app twice is a miracle.

Getting someone to open an app regularly only happens, and I mean only, after months of focusing on your customer's behavior enough to turn a product that’s likely bad into a product that has product market fit.

• Instagram was once Burbn - who knows what the fuck that was supposed to do.
• Yelp was once CitySearch - again, no idea what the functions were back then.
• Slack was originally for gamers - They eventually found their purpose in workplace communication, then Discord cracked the code for gamers.
• The iPhone came from the iPod, the iPad from the iPhone.

They’ll raise $5 Million to get 1 Million users, but they won’t be ready for them. Then they have to go back to the drawing board.

That’s when investors get upset. That panic starts going down the chain.

They start asking us to get them users who stay on their platform (read: miracles).

We ultimately lose the client. But that doesn’t matter, because the client was already gone.

The worst part? We always warn them. But they’ve already sold the business for $500M in their head.

Failures like these are BIG. It’s not unlikely that the founders kids college funds and house are on the line. It’s difficult to watch. Not because it’s sad, but because of who that person becomes when it’s all falling down.

• Being grabby
• All the sudden becoming mean
• Blaming others and pushing accountability
• Avoiding people they owe money too because they can’t pay

For this reason, it’s much, much better to fail first.

What does failing first look like?

It looks like stopping yourself from getting distracted by your self-delusions about how good your idea is.

It means finding 10 customers or users - not hundreds, thousands, or millions - and playing hardcore customer service rep until they are absolutely obsessed with what you’ve given them.

Of course, if they are not ever obsessed, then you scrap the idea all together and move on!

Even better is taking the time to sit down and talk with your theoretical customers and talking about nothing but problems.

If you are not extremely clear on what painful problem your target customer has, and exactly how their life would be better if they had your solution, you don’t actually have a business.

What you have is an experiment. And that’s ok!

That’s the right way to go about the process. Not the wrong way.

You might look around and see people quickly growing their business, read news about 18 year olds who raised $30M from VCs, and hear about kids becoming famous on social media.

But if that were the right way to go about it, then why do 95% of them fail?

Obviously, they are doing something WRONG, not right.

I’ll end with this.

“There are no good ideas and bad ideas, only ones that have been tested and those that haven’t.”

• Marc Randolph - cofounder of Netflix (if you remember, they used to ship DVDs to people)