This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Hey, hey, what's up listeners, friends, community. SIDIL School, you guys are awesome. Thank you so much for being here. I'm so grateful to be able to make this program for you every single day. My name is Chris Guillebeau, and it is Failure Friday.
I believe we can learn as much from failure as we can from success, if not more. And it's with this principle in mind that we're sharing a collection of short stories all about mistakes, missteps, disasters, and of course, failure. These stories vary quite a bit. Often they start with an idea, an assumption, something that the case study, the person thought would happen, and then what really happened, often a disconnect between those two things, and of course, what they learned along the way. So I really appreciate and I applaud their courage.
I'll share some of my own failure stories along the way as well. Today's short story features Lucas Lee Tyson from Boston. We told the successful story of how a teenager, that would be Lucas, learned to manage a $50,000 a month digital marketing contract way back on episode 790. So that was what, I don't know, 800 episodes ago or so. But as he grew, some things worked better than others.
Right, which is only natural, like he's experimenting. He's trying different stuff, which is what I encourage you to do. Experiment, try different stuff. So some things worked better than others. Let's hear directly from him about one of those things that didn't work so well.
And I'll come back at the end to wrap us up. But first, Lucas. [Music]
Hey, my name is Lucas Lee Tyson and I am the founder and CEO of GrowthCave.com. We're a digital marketing consultancy and advertising agency, helping entrepreneurs start and grow their own business using the power of online advertising on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Google. My story about failure comes from back in early 2020, I believe, and I had the idea of wanting to basically start a new business within our current business.
And I wanted to get into the software industry. Having worked with a lot of different clients, I saw a lot of the problems that firsthand, a lot of business owners had getting set up with their business on Facebook, on Instagram, and trying to get their ads online. And I wanted to create basically a software platform that would solve a lot of those issues for our customers because I thought logically, we already had this big client base, we already had a lot of people that we could kind of get as first initial users, we thought it was gonna be a slammed up. So basically what happened and the root of my mistake was, instead of consulting with our customers, our clients, the people that we were working with every single day and figuring out the problems that they actually had, I just assumed the things that they would want in a piece of software. I assumed the problems that they currently had, I assumed the solutions that they were looking for.
And there were a lot of many failures within there. Obviously this being my very first software project, I had no idea how to properly set timeline, how to properly set scope with the developers that we had ended up hiring through a third party freelancing platform. So we'd initially planned for the project to take around like 10 or $15,000. It ended up costing nearly twice that at around 25, $30,000. And it ended up also taking double the length of time that we thought it would take.
It was originally planned for two to three months and ended up being closer to five or six months. And the worst part is, like I mentioned, after all of that money, after all that time spent, when I first brought it to my first couple clients, who I thought it was gonna be a Sam Duck, I thought they were gonna pull their credit card out right on the table and start paying for it. They all just said, yeah, that's cool. Maybe shoot me a link and I'll check it out later. And then I think out of the 25, 30 clients that I was hoping were going to sign up, we got like two.
And that software project has basically been junked on our end. It's basically a sunk cost and we've moved on to other projects. So really important lesson as someone that I thought I was going to have the mightish touch. I thought now that I had this initial business that was successful, that any business that I start was going to be successful as well. And I overlooked this very common problem that almost every entrepreneur has when they're starting their first couple businesses, which was simply not listening to the market, not figuring out what people are actually willing to pay for and simply assumed what people were going to pay for based on what I thought I knew about the market.
[Music]
Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat. That is the theme of Failure Friday. Thank you so much, Lucas. I'm grateful to him for helping us out with this segment. Check out his website, growthcave.com, or follow him on YouTube at Lucas Lee Tyson.
If you have a question, if you'd like to update us about your hustle, tell us what's on your mind, what you're struggling with, or report a victory. We like all the things. Come to sidehustleschool.com/questions. As mentioned, this was episode 16, 16. So today's show notes.
All right, sidehustleschool.com/1616. Thank you for joining me today. You are awesome. Remember that we're all on a journey here. Some things work out, some things don't, but you really need to keep going.
And I hope you will do that. I will do that as well. I'm gonna be back tomorrow with episode 16, 17, and I hope you'll join me. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is Side Hustle School.
[Music]
From the Onward Project.
