This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
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If you've been listening for a while, you might be familiar with the segment known as Failure Friday. It's one of my favorite things to work on here on the podcast. A collection of short stories about mistakes, missteps, disasters, and of course, failure. Just all the stuff that goes wrong. You know, all the stuff that goes wrong and what we can learn from it, how it can make us stronger, help us recover or fight back or whatever it is we need to do to move on or at least move forward.
So, welcome to Side Hustle School. My name's Chris Guillebeau. Today's Failure Friday short story features Annie Singer. Now, Annie is the founder of this really cool project called Reciply.com. Reciply, she's gonna tell you more about it, it offers ad-free recipes from small creators.
If you ever try to use online recipes, you know it's frustrating because those sites are typically cluttered with ads. I mean, and that's how they make money, so it's cool, but it's just not a great user experience. So, Annie describes her project as an equitable model, the first in this industry in fact, because her pitch to consumers is, Recipally pays creators from your membership fee so that you can enjoy distraction-free cooking. As I said, very cool project. But as you'll hear, Annie was reluctant to tell people about it.
And that's because a previous project had flopped, leaving her feeling intimidated and even shamed. So, I relate to that. I felt that way myself before, but I think it's best for her to tell you her story. So, let's hear from Annie. I'll come back at the end with a quick wrap-up.
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My name is Annie Singer, and I'm the founder of Recipally, an ad-free recipe platform that's equitable for small creators. Anyone who's cooked from an online recipe knows how frustrating the user experience is. You're inundated with ads, auto-play videos, and pop-ups. There are 10 paragraphs of text before you actually get to the ingredients. And at the most inconvenient moment when your fingers are covered in dough, your screen decides to sleep, and you've got to figure out how to scroll back down all the way and find the information you need.
Recipally aims to solve the user experience issues with online recipes by partnering directly with creators and paying them for the usage of their content. I've been working on Recipally since April of 2021, but I didn't let anyone know about the project until we were almost ready to launch in August. This hesitation stemmed from a past failure I had years ago. In 2017, I co-founded a ketogenic supplement company. We invested $5,000 in raw materials, and we managed to build our minimum viable product.
I posted on my personal social media, and I tried to get my friends and family excited for our launch. As soon as we launched, we immediately flopped on our faces. Our encapsulator backed out last minute, and that tiny supply chain issue ended up being such a huge obstacle that we never recovered. It wasn't that the problem itself was that big of a deal, but my co-founder and I were both working on other projects that were struggling, and we were so burnt out that we couldn't overcome this little obstacle. Since then, I've struggled a lot with the embarrassment and shame of that experience.
I've quietly started and quit a handful of businesses, but I've never openly talked about what I'm working on. In April of 2021, I started working on Reciply, which would eventually become such a large and important project to me that I would have to share about it. It took me months to mention it to the majority of my friends and my network, and I felt a lot of anxiety when that time came. I was afraid that people would remember my last failure and roll their eyes at the thought of me starting another new business. I felt like I was pestering people when I asked them to share about Reciply with their own circles, because previously, I had asked people to share about a business that immediately failed.
Ultimately, I received nothing but positive feedback and encouragement when I finally built up the courage to share Reciply with my network. I get tagged by friends all the time in posts and discussions on LinkedIn and Instagram about the user experience issues with online recipes, and that's because my friends are just as excited about what I'm doing as I am. There were two major lessons that I learned from this failure. One is that external circumstances that have nothing to do with your business can have an equal or greater impact than the things actually happening within the business. But more importantly, for me, the people in my network are there to lift me up, not tear me down.
And if you don't have the same experience, you probably need a new network. For the most part, I'm the only one who's gonna remember my own failures. And even if someone else remembers them, they're more excited about helping me get to my next win than reminding me of my last failure. Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat. That is the theme of Failure Friday.
Let's add a couple points from Annie here. She says, external circumstances that have nothing to do with your business can have an equal or greater impact than the things actually happening in your business. I think that actually connects to some psychological law as well in terms of not assigning enough importance to circumstances that you don't have any control over. In other words, thinking that everything is your fault because of some mistake you've made or otherwise for something you've done, when in fact there are lots of external circumstances that can impact everything we do. And I think she also said you get to the next win by moving through that past failure.
I really love this very honest, transparent, and truthful story. One of my favorites of the year, in fact, so far. I encourage you to check out Annie's website, Reciply.com, just like it sounds, R-E-C-I-P-L-E.com, or most social networks at Reciply app. Awesome project, definitely makes it much easier to use online recipes. And you also have to love that equitable model of paying small creators.
All right, that's it for today. If you have a question or an update for us about your side hustle, sidehustleschool.com/questions. We've got a new episode tomorrow, every single day in fact. I hope you'll subscribe or follow, come back for more. My name is Chris Guillebeau, this is Side Hustle School.
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From the Onward Project.
