I shut down a startup with 7,000+ users in 37 countries.
Grown Not Flown connected flower farmers directly with customers. I launched it in 2021 with my own money, and it grew to 2,100+ growers, won awards and put me on stage at Parliament House with the Prime Minister in the audience. Then I closed it.
According to every startup podcast, I should have walked away glowing with wisdom. Fail fast, fail forward, fail better. What I had instead was a tired brain, a lighter bank account and no idea yet what any of it had taught me.
Fail fast suits a different kind of business
The phrase comes from venture-backed tech, where a founder is one of many bets an investor has made and the money in the account belongs to someone else. In that world, failing fast makes sense. You find out the idea is a dud, everyone shrugs, and the money moves to the next bet.
My startup was self-funded. So is nearly every small business I know. When it’s your savings, your evenings and your name in a town where everyone shops at the same supermarket, failure isn’t a fun experiment. It costs you something, and pretending it doesn’t is how capable people end up thinking they did failure wrong too.
Failing doesn’t teach you anything
Failure on its own teaches you nothing. Plenty of people fail at the same thing 3 times in a row, with great enthusiasm.
The lesson comes from the review. Sitting down afterwards, once the sting has dulled, and asking what happened, why it happened and what you’d do differently. It’s the R in SPARC, and it’s the step most people skip because the next shiny idea is already calling.
Scar tissue is the right picture for it. A scar is what’s left after a wound has healed. Skip the healing and you don’t have scar tissue, you have a wound you keep bumping into furniture.
What mine taught me
When I did the review on Grown Not Flown, 4 things stung the most.
Hiring doesn’t fix a system problem. I thought more hands would sort things out. They didn’t. I’d spent 20+ years fixing how big businesses run, so I knew better, and I did it anyway.
Slow shipping is its own kind of failing. Once we went global, the list of things our users needed grew faster than we could build them.
Pay yourself. I paid everyone else first and didn’t pay me. A business that only works when the founder is free isn’t working.
A business that only works when the founder is free isn’t working.
Impressive on the outside can be chaos on the inside. From the outside it was awards, 15,000+ Instagram followers and a podcast charting in multiple countries. From the inside it was chaotic, and it couldn’t last.
None of that arrived as wisdom on the day we closed. It took time, and a fair amount of muttering, to turn it into anything useful. Those 4 lessons now shape every decision I make about what to build and how small to start.
Fail small, cheap and on purpose
So I won’t tell you to fail fast. Fail small. Shrink the test until getting it wrong costs you an afternoon and not a year.
I rebuilt our farm website in 12 hours and built an ordering app for the farm shop in under 4. If either had flopped, I’d have lost a weekend and learned something. That’s the kind of failure a self-funded business can afford.
When something doesn’t work, give it a few days, then ask 3 questions:
You don’t have to love failing. I don’t. Make it cheap enough to survive, then do the boring bit afterwards where you work out what it was for.
If you’d like company for the boring bit, that’s what we do in the Milking Ducks community.