The Inevitable Entrepreneurial ‘Oops’

Navigating Entrepreneurial Mistakes: Embracing the Learning Curve

By Nicola Good, COO and Cofounder of that Works For Me

If you’re an entrepreneur, you will at some point in your journey, even at many points in your journey, make entrepreneurial errors.

Mistakes are inevitable. None of us are perfect and “failing” is an essential pitstop on the long journey to success. It’s a rite of passage!

I really don’t like the word fail. I don’t think a mistake is actually a failure at all, because mistake-making is a learning experience, and the more you have, the more you learn. I’m sure you’ve heard it all before, but I think it’s really important to normalise mistake making if you’re going to be an entrepreneur, because rest assured, no matter how good you are, you will make mistakes.

That Works For Me works with freelancers and work-seekers, bringing them flexible working opportunities via our digital platform. When starting out, like many entrepreneurs, we had some major successes, but also some considerable setbacks, which we absolutely look back on as key learning periods. We wouldn’t be a normal business if we didn’t have them!

As proud female founders, my cofounder Jess and I fully complement each other’s skills. Her background is business strategy and growth, and mine is project management and operations. So, when we set out on our journey, we knew a lot about what we needed to do to run our business, and between us had the tools to make it a success.

As a tech-based business, we looked at audience, brand, TOV and finally, how the platform would work. We wrote huge technical specs to outline what we wanted the platform to do.  We created wireframes and user journeys. It was very complex and sometimes we would tie ourselves in knots as it felt like one huge puzzle.

When we finally handed over to our development team, I don’t think they fully appreciated the complexity of what they were creating.  They managed to build us about 70% of what we wanted, but the final 30% was a huge struggle. We were striving for absolute perfection, we wanted all the bells and whistles and would go back and forth with our dev team on the final 30%, pushing and pushing and spending all of our time and energy on an almost impossible goal. In hindsight, and something I have always told my clients in the past, is that we should have had our MVP (minimum viable product) outlined, built and launched with what we needed, so we could start gaining traction, see what worked and what didn’t, and finish the development from there. The truth is, you might not need everything you think you do, and the final product almost never looks exactly like you think it will at the beginning.

I should have listened to my own advice more and stripped everything back to the basics. If we had done that, we would have launched three months earlier, and be three months further down the line now! The final 30% of what we needed still hasn’t been built even now, our members don’t think we need it! Instead, we’ve focused our attention on making the improvements that they have asked for – and the feedback we’re getting is great!

I’ve learnt a lot!

When your entrepreneurial ‘oops’ moments come, remember to keep calm. Try to be curious about how it happened rather than angry that it did. Most importantly, regroup, move on and don’t worry about it.

Explore, innovate and improve. Make mistake after mistake, and learn every step of the way. Just try not to make the same mistake twice!