All My Biggest Business Failures. All The Embarrassing Details.

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1:17I'm sharing my failures today as uncomfortable as it is because most people don't. Most entrepreneurs, they just show you the highlight reel. They show you all the wins. But I believe that most successful people, most successful entrepreneurs, they have a graveyard of failures that they're just kind of hiding. They don't want to share it. They're a bit embarrassed. But I find that the failures are where all the learning happens. Here's the biggest takeaway of today's episode up front. Failure is actually your friend. It's free tuition. You're going to learn a ton through each of your failures.

1:47In fact, each of the failures I'm going to be sharing with you today led to success, led to successes that were the best successes of my life because I treated failure as tuition, as a way to learn something and as a way to not do something. So that is the lesson up front, but I'm going to give you the details and why and how you can approach your failures in a way that you can actually extract value and turn them into successes. And the last failure I'm going to be sharing with you today is the strangest failure of all because the business was a success, but I still failed somehow.

2:24Welcome back to the$100 MBA show. I'm your host, Omar Zinhome, where I deliver practical business lessons three times a week, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday to help you start, grow, and scale your business. If this show has helped in any way, it would be amazing if you could drop us a quick review on whatever app you're using to listen to this podcast right now. It helps me and my team bring new episodes every week. And more importantly, more entrepreneurs will be able to discover our podcast so you can help someone else start their journey. Thanks so much. The first failure happened in January of 2014.

3:02Nicole and I were running a lot of webinars to grow our community at the$100 MBA. And we realized it was a lot of work to put a webinar together, to put all the technical pieces together, but also it was a lot of work to put the slides together and to present. So we created a product called the DIY Webinar Guide. It was a PDF guide along with some online courses, some online videos that people could watch and learn how to do what we do. We put in four months of dedicated work building the DIY Webinar Guide and putting the offer together, writing the guide, shooting the course, building the sales page for this product, marketing the launch, a ton of work.

3:42Nicole and I were so proud of the work we put into. We actually dedicated this guy to our mothers. We thought this is going to be so big and our mothers are going to be famous. We launched it and we got two sales. Yep. Two sales. In fact, one of the sales was a chargeback, which was fraud. Basically, it wasn't actually a real sale. And the other sale was actually a sympathy sale from a friend, fellow entrepreneur friend, John Lee Dumas. Shout out to you, John Lee Dumas, for supporting and giving us that one sale. But I can't tell you how heartbreaking that was. Four months of work, really believing this thing is going to be amazing, really believing this is valuable, and then launching out to the world and realizing, oh man, nobody wants this.

4:20I think it's important not to gloss over failures. You need to feel the pain of a failure so that you don't repeat it. And we need to sit with that pain for a moment. Like for a moment, just think about it. Four months of work, how many hours is that? That's like 40 hours a week, five days a week for four weeks every month for four months, making no money, and then at the end getting one sale from a friend that doesn't even cover any of your costs, you're in the super negative here, okay? So it's really deflating. It's good to feel the pain so that you can be like, hey, I got to learn something from this so I don't do this again.

4:53So what did I learn from this epic failure? Well, the first thing I learned is that people don't want to learn how to do something as technical, as complex as putting a webinar together. They want a tool. They want it done for them. They didn't want education. They wanted a solution to their existing problem. And I didn't understand that until I crashed and burned and failed with the DIY webinar guide. If I was going to really put this into one word, it's the word outcomes. People buy outcomes. They want an outcome. People don't buy a new jacket because they're cold, but they buy a new jacket because they want to feel cool, right?

5:28They want to look cool. They want to be able to post it on Instagram and get compliments. They want to feel good about themselves. That's the outcome they're looking for. And with us, they want to run a smooth, easy to run webinar that makes them sales. That's the outcome they're looking for. So when I realized this, that is the birth of the idea of our software company, Webinar Ninja, which is a tool that puts all the technical pieces together, makes it easy for you to run a webinar and allows them to make money through a webinar, whether they're selling products and services. So the software did it for them rather than having to learn and do it for themselves.

6:03So it's easy to get the outcome. And what I learned is that when you're selling a product and people can get an outcome quickly with very little effort, it's easy to sell that product. That product is super easy to sell because they see the pain being resolved quickly. If you know anything about me and us and our whole story, Webinar Ninja was a business that we ran for 10 years. We got acquired in 2024, changed my life forever financially. that failure, that DIY webinar guide failure helped me understand what I was doing wrong so I could do something right, built Webinar Ninja that changed my life forever.

6:36So as much as I hated those four months of hard work and hitting that wall and having that horrible failure and feeling like a loser in that time, I'm so glad it happened because it gave me the tools and the understanding to know what to build. But that's the key. You have to be receptive to it. You can't just be like, oh, that sucks. I'm horrible. Maybe business is not for me. You can't be so down on yourself that you blind yourself from the learnings. You got to just be objective sometimes, be like, okay, that didn't work. Just like if you are going to play any kind of game or sport. Let's say, for example, you love to play basketball like me and you play a pickup game and you lose that game.

7:15It's not great to lose, but you can find out like what happened. Oh, maybe we didn't rebound. Maybe we didn't defend. Next time we play, we got to do these things better. So hopefully we can win. You just keep playing. It's okay. Just learn and keep going on. Investing with Schwab is like spending a Saturday at a great farmer's market. You can fill your reusable tote with a bit of everything. Maybe you go for some free-range, self-directed investing. Or perhaps you pick up a few farm-fresh trades while you peruse. You can even get help from a dedicated advisor. That's full-service wealth management.

7:46Mix, match, and change your mind whenever you want. Because at Schwab, you can invest your way. No matter your goals or appetite for investing, Schwab has everything you need all in one place. Visit schwab.com to learn more. You spent money to get that customer's call. Ads, referrals, word of mouth, doesn't matter. The moment it rings out unanswered, that's not just a missed opportunity. That's a sunk cost walking out the door. That's why today's episode is brought to you by Quo, spelled Q-U-O, the business phone system built so you never miss a call. With Quo, all your calls, texts, and voicemails live in one place so anyone on your team can pick up a conversation, see the full history, and respond fast.

8:29Set up in minutes on any device, keep your existing number, and add teammates as you grow. No IT, no hassle. And Quo's built-in AI agent handles after-hours calls, answers questions, and even books appointments so you never miss a lead, even when your team is offline. One of the reasons I attribute any success I've had in business is great customer support and service. And Quo makes that easy. Money's on the line. Always say hello with Quo. Try Quo for free, plus get 20 % off your first six months when you go to Quo.com slash MBA. That's Quo.com slash MBA. Failure number two. My first podcast.

9:13This podcast, The$100 MBA Show, is not my first podcast. Our first podcast was called People Who Know Their S***. Funny name, good name. Unfortunately, the podcast wasn't so good, okay? It was one of my biggest failures. It was an interview podcast where we interviewed other entrepreneurs, and we brought them on the show, and we published these episodes just like everybody else. And that's the problem. It was just like everybody else. Same format as every other interview podcast out there. Now, remember, this was 2014. Most podcasts, especially in the business space, were interview podcasts. So we were not really presenting anything exceptional or anything different or anything unique or any kind of unique value.

9:53We spent six months publishing this podcast week after week, and we published over 40 episodes in the process because we actually did some extra episodes as well. Our best episode ever was with Gary Vaynerchuk, Gary Vaynerchuk, who was a great guest, but that episode got 400 downloads. And just for context, so you can understand, you know, I was getting more views on my blog posts that time. And it was a lot of effort to put together a podcast and to get guests like Gary Vaynerchuk. This podcast, The$100 MBA Show, gets between 100 ,000 and 150 ,000 downloads an episode. So 400 downloads, not so impressive.

10:29So we really felt invisible. We felt like this podcast is a lot of effort and is not working. Why is it not working? Funny enough, us realizing that we're failing at this podcast came at a good time when we're about to go on a road trip. Nicole, at the time, was still doing video work as a videographer, and she had a gig in New York. And at the time, we were living in San Diego, and we were trying to save some money, and we had the time on our hands, kind of licking our wounds. So we thought, let's drive across country, do a road trip, have a discussion, and do some work at New York for the film work.

11:01And on that road trip, we had nothing but the open road and our thoughts. and we had to ask ourselves some honest questions like how are we going to compete with other podcasts, other interview podcasts that were out at the same time we were? People like Tim Ferriss, who has four New York Time bestselling books. Okay, how am I gonna compete with this guy? All this guy does is win. How am I gonna compete with Dave Ramsey, who's been on radio since the beginning of time and now is running a podcast that's highly successful? How am I going to compete with Jordan Harbinger, who was podcasting since 2006.

11:35That's before the iPhone. Like, how am I going to compete if I'm just going to be doing the same thing they're doing, interviewing other people in the space? So through that honest conversation and looking at our failure for what it is, we learned a few things. Here's what we learned from this failure. Number one, we realized that we can't win if we're playing their game. What does that mean? It means that we are not leveraging our own strengths. We don't want to compete with other people's strengths. We want to compete with our strengths. So if you look at my history or my career, I was a school teacher for over a decade.

12:12And I have a master's in education. And I taught five classes five days a week for over 12 years. So what can I do better than them? I can teach. I'm probably a better teacher than Tim Ferriss, despite the fact that he's a New York Times bestselling author. or Jordan Harmager, who's been interviewing guests since 2006. I'm probably a better teacher than them because of my experience, because of my unique experience. So we realized maybe we should be interviewing people and we should start teaching. And that was kind of the light bulb moment, that we're not leveraging our strengths, leveraging our unique experiences.

12:45So that failure, that low moment of realizing, man, this podcast is not working. We're spending all this time and effort and looking like fools in front of our guests with not that many downloads. That moment made us get real, get honest and say, hey, how are we going to compete with these people? What can I do that they can't do? So therefore, I can compete in my own game. And one of the biggest takeaways I want you to take away from this is that don't try to leverage other people's advantages. Don't play other people's games. Don't try to hop on a trend just because there's a trend. Figure out what you can do better than most people.

13:20Figure out where your unique experiences, your unique talents, your unique passions can actually shine through. Play your game, not other people's games. And when we did that, when we decided, hey, we're going to start teaching on this podcast instead of, you know, just interviewing guests. And that's when we launched the$100 NBA show, which was a, at the time, we published five days a week, short lessons. It was 15, 20 minutes, just like what you're used to right now. And it was just information, no fluff, no backstories. You know, while other people had these long interviews where maybe there was about 20 minutes of juice of real good information and the rest is a bunch of banter.

13:57We just condensed that 20 minutes into just like pure knowledge so that you can learn something, implement, come back for more tomorrow so that you can improve as an entrepreneur. And that changed everything for us. That podcast was an instant success. Like we're nobodies, right? We have no audience. And then we launched this podcast with this new format that no one ever seen before in our space, in the business education space. And we automatically hit the top of the charts because people are like, this is new. This is different. I'm being served information in a format that I haven't seen before.

14:29So we're serving the underserved. The reason why I share this with you is that that failure was painful, but it led to a huge success for us. And in fact, that year we launched in 2014, the$100 MBA show. six months later, we won Best of Apple, which is awarded to like a dozen podcasts. We won it during the same year as Serial and Startup and actually Tim Ferriss. And the funny thing is I emailed Apple to ask them, why did we win this award? I was happy and surprised, but I wanted to know why. And the answer was you added something new to the genre of the business podcast. And that is my lesson to you.

15:03My takeaway to you is that you can zig when other people are zagging. You can do something different and leverage your own strength so you can stand out and be successful in your own game. Hey, I'm hoping you're getting value from this honest version of my story, of my journey, giving you my embarrassing moments so that you can win. So hit subscribe if you are winning. I want you to subscribe because we have an upcoming episode I don't want you to miss. It's called, How Do I Know If My Business Is Failing or If I Should Keep Going? Many people ask me this question. they asked me like, hey, how do I know if I should just persevere and just dig deep and keep grinding at my business?

15:38Or should I just realize that, hey, it failed. I need to change just like the failures I share with you today. Hit subscribe so you don't miss it. It's coming up soon. All right. Failure number three. This is the weirdest failure of them all. This is a business I started in 2008. It was called Zenom Designs. It was a success as a business, but a failure overall, and I'll explain. So what was Zen Home Designs? Well, it was an online custom tailored clothing line for tall men like me. I used to get my clothes tailored when I was working in Dubai as a teacher because tailor shops were very normal there.

16:13And I would get them because I have long arms and I'm tall and I have a longer torso. And most clothes I would buy from a department store would never fit me. So I would get these clothes tailored and I would go back home to the States and visit family and friends and people would compliment me on the shirts I would be wearing. This looks great. This looks beautiful. Where'd you get the shirt? And I was like, oh, is this something I tailored for myself? It's like, oh, can you make me a shirt? I thought, okay. And there was this huge demand from my friends, my family, even my friends of my friends of getting them shirts tailored for them.

16:42So what I did is I created this short PDF measuring tape where they can cut out and measure themselves with the important measurements that the tailor would ask me, like your neck size, your arm size, your torso, things like that. And they would send me their measurements and I would say, hey, I'll send you the shirt. Here are some shirts that I have. I just take pictures with my phone and say, hey, tell me which ones you want and I'll make them for you. And then I just marked up the price a little bit so that it was worth my time and covered my costs of shipping. And they would get the shirt like three months later.

17:11This is like really low cost, very MVP. I didn't even see it as a business at the time. But what happened was that the demand for these shirts and these clothing was really starting to grow from my friends and family. I was getting like 10 a month, 20 a month. At one point, it was like 30 people were asking me for a shirt a month. I was like, okay, this is, I got a full-time job. This is a lot of work. Maybe I should formalize this, make it a business, have a website. And that's exactly what I did. And something happened that I didn't expect. The business worked. I had so many customers, had so many orders.

17:44The website was flooded with orders and we had back order. We would sell out from all our special models and colors. There was some real demand that was happening because not a lot of people were doing custom tailored clothing at the time online. And I was able to like tap into a service like tailoring in Dubai that is not very common in the West, like in the US. And I ran this business just myself. I had some part-time help. I had three warehouses across the States because it was just cheaper to send the sclap in a warehouse and they would be able to ship it from the warehouse. We were selling in every major continent.

18:18I think at one point we were doing like something like 5 ,000 sales every quarter. So every three months, we have 5 ,000 units sold. And it was successful and it was great. Problem is, I was miserable. I hated the business. Running the business drained me. I wasn't excited about it. My customers were more excited about the products than I was. There was things I had to do, like come up with new models and I would have to actually hire physical models, real people to wear the clothes and get photography done and post them on the website. All this stuff was boring to me. I was like, I don't want to do this.

18:50I like to dress nicely, but fashion is not my passion. It's not something I want to do for the rest of my life. And what I learned in this process, which is why I'm sharing this failure, is sometimes you will start a business because you see an opportunity, because there's a demand. And it's like, wait, I want to win. This looks good. I want to make some money. And then what happens is that you do make some money. You do grow. The business starts going, and the business starts owning you. And if you don't enjoy what you do every day in your business, it's gonna be very hard to be sustainable. And I realized that.

19:19I was cooked, right? I was really, really burnt out to the point where I actually just closed down the business. I just could not do it anymore. I couldn't take another order. I couldn't manage another thing. I was just so burnt out. And the biggest failure of all is that I was so burnt out that it didn't even dawn on me that I could sell the business, right? I could just sell it to my competitor or somebody that really loves the business, one of my customers, I was just so burnt out that I just like, I don't want to deal with this anymore. I just shut the website down. I sent an email to all my customers like, we're no longer taking orders.

19:50Game over. So here are the takeaways I learned from this failure. Market demand is not enough to justify starting a business, right? Why? Because business is a long road. It's consuming. It's taxing. It's going to cost you more than just time and money. It's going to cost you a part of your soul. It's going to take time away from your family, time away from the things that you love, your hobbies, the things that you enjoy. It's going to change who you are as a person. So you got to choose wisely. And I learned a big lesson through that burnout, through like just shutting things down and not wanting to deal with this anymore, is that like, I never want to get to that point again.

20:27And that's why when I started all my businesses after that, I was very deliberate about like, am I going to enjoy what I'm doing? If I just make enough money to live and that's it, will I be a happy camper? And I'm happy to say that today, yes, I am super happy. I love doing what we do with the podcast. I love working with smart people on my team. I enjoy it. I'm also very mindful of like not going too hard, like making sure that I don't get to that burnout stage or, you know, I will sometimes just push, push and want more growth and realize, oh no, weekends are a good idea. Holidays are a good idea to make sure burnout doesn't happen.

21:00So it was a huge lesson. It probably cost me a lot of money that I didn't sell the business or I didn't do anything with my inventory. I literally just gave all my clothes in the storage to goodwill. I was just like, I gave it to like a charity. I just didn't want to deal with it. And that's how bad the burnout was. But I learned that if you don't monitor yourself, you don't realize what you're getting into. If you don't understand that joy and happiness and fulfillment through your business, that's one of the dividends. That's one of the things that you're supposed to get out of your business.

21:28And if you're not getting it, it's going to be very hard for you to sustain that business. So notice a pattern with all my three huge failures, The DIY webinar guide led to Webinar Ninja, which changed my life. People who know their s***, that podcast, right, that failed miserably, gave us the$100 MBA show, which is the most successful thing ever built. Zenova Designs, my clothing line, failed miserably, but it gave me the filter I use for every business, for every project that I move into. It actually is a filter for everything I do, like even on a holiday. Like, are we going to go on holiday to this place?

21:59Well, I'm actually going to enjoy it, or am I just doing it because that's what I'm supposed to do, or everybody's saying this is a great place to go. Do I enjoy the crowds? No, not really. Maybe I should go to a smaller city. This idea of really imagine yourself in that situation, in that business in this case, and see if you're really going to enjoy it. None of those failures, as painful as they were, were a waste of time or a waste of money because I harvest the lesson. I took it on and I realized, okay, yes, this is horrible. I lost. It's not a good feeling. I feel bad. All that stuff is true, and it's good to feel it so you don't do it again.

22:36But it's so important for you to say, okay, what can I learn from this? What can I take away from this? What am I going to do differently next time? How is this going to change me as a human being? That's really important. One of the things I remind myself always is your failures are not your record. They're your education. They're the way that you actually collect your diploma. These are the credits you need to have so that you can have successes. And the thing is, is that a lot of us, we're not willing to try because we're afraid to fail. And that's just not how it works in life or in business.