My Favourite Failure: Build in private, fail in public -Faisal Abid

0:00Let me ask you a question. If someone wanted to access your company's devices or premises, how difficult would it be? If they had a helping hand on the inside, could they get it done? The answer is probably yes, which is why we're working with the National Protective Security Authority and the National Cybersecurity Center to share their secure innovation campaign. They can see that state actors, as well as competitors and criminals, are looking to steal from UK startups. You're probably aware that your cybersecurity needs to be rock solid, but a lot of startups forget about insider risk. Take one company the NPSA told us about who had a disgruntled member of staff.

0:38A state actor charmed them into stealing the company's flagship software, which they then took to the state-owned business instead, costing the company billions. If you want to get a better handle on your security, the Secure Innovation campaign can help. Check out npsa.gov.uk forward slash innovation and download their free quick start guide. There's a link in the show notes. Hello and welcome to Secret Leaders. When it comes to starting a business, there's so much romanticism about the idea. The sketch on the back of a napkin that gives birth to new companies and, I don't know, changes the world.

1:17But ideas are cheap. The real magic comes from building a business. Faisal Abid, co-founder of Irene Cremation, learned this hard-won wisdom just out of uni when he started his first business. In fact, I left university to start this business. And the idea was, let's build a social marketplace for Android. Android had just launched, like, I think it had been like a week since it launched, and it had no paid apps. And so my idea was, well, let's build a store where you can sell apps, like the App Store. And I worked on that business for four years. Yes, four years to basically not get anywhere.

2:06Basil's time wasn't all lost, though. It was actually a great opportunity to learn lessons that have helped him ever since. Everyone has failed. You can find every successful entrepreneur, they have failed. They have failed multiple times, and they continue to fail. You can see, even if you look at the products that big companies have pulled out, pushed out, They do those fail all the time. But it's important that you recognise where you went wrong. So where did Faisal go wrong? He had a legitimate and plausible business plan. And he had a co-founder. I kind of delegated the entire business to my co-founder.

2:47Very smart guy, but he was mainly business and he wasn't technical. The problem there specifically was not that we weren't good at what we were doing, it's that we didn't know how to sell the other part. I didn't know what the business priorities were because I had so little context into the business and he didn't know what the technical priorities were despite, you know, the business being a tech business. Okay, so not keeping enough of an eye on the business was a problem, but at this point it wasn't their main problem. Like Faisal said, it's not like they weren't good at what they did. Their main problem came from the fact they were only doing the one thing they knew how to do, build.

3:30I think the second big mistake, you know, we had these two smart guys, but the problem was we were too smart for our own good, where we just kept building and not really launching. Technically, if I look back now, we could have launched that business in months, probably two months. But it took two years to launch it. Why? Because every step of the way, the two smart guys in the room said, hmm, why don't we also build this? And then there was a feedback loop of, oh, yeah, that's a great idea. Let's build that. And then, okay, that's going to take me just like two months to build. Okay, you know what?

4:10Let's just wait two more months, and then we launch it. And then it's going to be like, we build it, and they will come. So after two years in development and 50 ,000 features shoved into the app, we launched this. and nothing happens. Why? Because like we got like 10 users, we got some press. There's still probably an article on Wired Magazine when we launched and we got a bunch of people coming onto that. But like, that's it. Like they didn't find a use case for it because there were so many things to do on it. And so we missed multiple times we could have launched because we wanted to make it perfect.

4:51I have learned since then not to focus on perfection. I have learned to just like build it, let the customers decide if it's useful, then make it perfect. Because if you build something perfect and the customer has no use for it, it's useless anyways. And so then what do we do? Well, crap, we do what every good startup does, is pivot. it. This point from Faisal is so important. The only way to know if you're creating something that people actually value is if you launch it. You just have to get it out there. Faisal's pivot was to turn the business into a sort of Netflix for apps, a product that would allow users to access a library of apps through one subscription.

5:38This pivot didn't quite work either. Each time you felt terrible. The first time you're like, okay, we got this. Okay, it happens. The second time you're like, oh, again. And the third time, you're just like, man, like, like, this sucks. And I guess you're just not cut out for this. And, you know, this is the that's it, like, I'm never gonna be I'm never gonna have a good idea again, or I'm never gonna build something again. And so you feel really bad. And, and then you'll go on to like websites, and you see these companies raising all this money and you're like wow right like it's not like what's wrong with me if they can do it why can't i and you just go in a circle the thing that i will say is it's totally fine to feel that but what you have to do is you have to objectively see and recognize what you did wrong and really reflect on if you were to build something again what would you do differently.

6:39So in this latest attempt, what went wrong? It wasn't because of too much building. We launched that pretty soon. But the lesson he learned from this failure was that building a product isn't the same as building a business. I know how to build software really well, but what I now need to learn how to build is businesses. And that's where I started to really focus in on the next year or two, just doing a lot of consulting for free a lot of times, but working with very talented entrepreneurs to be like, hey, I'm going to build you this thing for free, but you need to show me how to run a business.

7:17Tell me about how you're going to launch this product, how you're marketing it, and I'm going to follow along. So that's how I ended up learning through osmosis in the next couple of years on how to build businesses and then trying multiple different startups, some of them which ended up succeeding, some of them didn't. But each time you learn something new. One thing I learned was a lot of business is networking. A lot of people just try to work in isolation. And working in isolation doesn't work. What works is you have to talk about your idea, you have to get other people's opinions. Not that their opinion is valid a lot of times, but there is some merit in understanding what their point of view is to understand, is this the target customer I'm looking for?

8:07And am I building correctly? All of this networking was helping Faisal fill in the gaps about what it takes to build a successful business. He'd learned that building a product wasn't enough. It had to be tested in public. You have to get feedback. But eventually, he met one more person. This person was a successful entrepreneur, and he helped Faisal realize one more crucial lesson about product market fit. I remember working with a very successful entrepreneur. He had sold his company for a couple hundred million, and I was connected to him just through my networking and whatever. him and I started working on a product together.

8:47And I told him, hey, let's make this product free. And let's get a bunch of users because people will use it if it's free. And he said to me, sure, you will use anything if it's free. That doesn't mean you have a successful product. If someone pays for it, that's when you know you have a successful product. And to me, I was like, wow, getting someone to pay for a product that like in my mind, And I think I was 21 at this time. I was like, wow, that seems like such a wild thing. Someone's going to pay for this. And I said, okay, sure, let's charge it. And I remember that first day someone bought it.

9:27And I said, wow, someone actually bought this. And we tested out so many different pricing plans. And what that revenue gave us was the ability to test, scale, and pay ourselves eventually. And that was such a big learning that since then, I have tried so many different products, built many products, and the products that I don't give away for free always seem to work. That's because it's an easy way to test, have you built something? It's very easy to get that tech crunch or whatever the latest media is now, to get that hype cycle of like, oh crap, a thousand people came to my website. It's much better.

10:10Instead of having 10 ,000 people on your website, it's better to have 10 paying users because those 10 paying users will tell you so much about, are you building the right thing? And that's, that's what I started focusing on was how do I get five paying users, 10 paying users? I stopped. I did not build any more free apps or free products, websites or anything. It was just all about how do I build something of value. And that is business 101. And that's what he taught me. He was like, you're building a business. There's a value you're providing and someone's going to pay for it. That's it. Basil Labide is now running a successful business in the real world that people really pay for.

10:53And for that, he thanks his mistakes. I am where I am because of all these different failures and some successes along the way, because if it weren't for those, then I'd be making mistakes again. That's it for this episode. I want to thank Faisal for sharing his story and advice. And to you, thanks for listening. I've been your host, Dan Murray-Surter. See you next time.