MBA2605 How to Turn a Business Failure Into a Major Success

0:00Every successful entrepreneur has one thing in common. they've failed big time. I know because I've been there. Before the$100 MBA show became an award winning podcast, I launched a failed podcast that totally went nowhere. Before Webinar Ninja became a multi-million dollar software, I spent months building a course that totally flopped. But those failures, believe it or not, they were the best thing that ever happened to me. Because as Ben Horowitz says in one of my favorite books, The Hard Thing About Hard Things, sometimes to create a great product, you have to create a bad one first. Today, I'll show you exactly how I turned failure into success and how you can too.

0:43Welcome 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. Most people think failure means you're doing something wrong. It doesn't. Failure just means you just haven't figured it out yet. In business, the first version of your idea usually absolutely sucks, okay? That's normal. This podcast, The$100 MBA Show, wasn't my first podcast. The first one totally flopped. It was a horrendous failure. Webinar Ninja, the software company I built over 10 years and got acquired recently.

1:23Before it was a software, I tried selling a webinar course that no one wanted. But each failure taught me something. It taught me something critical, something that led me to a big success in each one. And I'm going to break down exactly how you can do the same. I'm going to actually walk you through the stories of my biggest failures and show you how it helped me become successful, what it showed me. And this is all to say that failure is a requirement of success. Once you start realizing that, you stop trying to avoid failure. You stop trying to not lose and you just try to win. And if you fail, that's okay.

1:59Failure number one, the podcast that flopped. Before the$100 MBA show, I launched a different podcast. That podcast was an interview podcast. It was called People Who Know Their SHIT. It was a longer formed podcast, a little over an hour each episode. It wasn't so polished, but it was very scripted and I was very nervous as an interviewer. Just to be flat out honest, I was horrible at interviewing, okay? It was boring and it wasn't any different or any better than any other podcast. And guess what? Nobody listened. Of course nobody listened. So why did it fail? Well, I did something that really I think was very helpful and I think a lot of people should do more often of is be honest with yourself.

2:41Just get an honest look at your situation. Nicole and I were doing a road trip from San Diego to New York. We were going across country and we had a lot of time in the open road to talk and discuss why this podcast is totally failing. I mean, we're working hard. We're getting guests. We actually got Gary Vaynerchuk on our show early in the days. It was like 2014. We're really excited. But on one of the best episodes we ever had, we had 400 downloads, which is okay, but it was less than how much traffic I was getting for a blog post. And just for comparison, some of our best episodes on this podcast get over 300 ,000 downloads.

3:17So something was wrong. So I just took an honest look. I went to the business section in Apple Podcasts, and I looked at all the top podcasts. I looked at people like Tim Ferriss, who has four New York Times bestsellers. I saw people like Jordan Harbinger, who was podcasting before the iPhone, like in 2007. I saw podcasts like Startup by Alex Bloomberg, who came from NPR. He got a wealth of experience. How am I going to compete with these people trying to just be a lookalike podcast, trying to just hang with these people and do the same thing? So the first thing I did wrong was I was copying what I thought podcasts were supposed to be instead of making something unique.

4:02I didn't look inwards. I just look outwards, look to other podcasts. and look inwards and say, what unique value can I add? Well, one unique value is that I'm an educator. I have a master's in education. I've taught for over 10 years. So I'm probably a better teacher than all these other podcasts. They're great at their other things and they have their own acclaim. But when it comes to teaching, I'm probably the best one just because of my unique experiences. So why am I interviewing people? I should be teaching on the podcast. And that's when we realized we need to do something different. I could have quit right there.

4:41I could have said, I stink at podcasting. I'm never going to do a podcast again. But instead, I asked myself the tough questions to get to a decent answer. Some of those answers was, what do business owners actually need? You know, they already have interview podcasts and backstory podcasts and, you know, narrative podcasts. But really, some people just need to learn something so they can build upon it and then come back again, learn something new. And we really wanted to build language lessons for the language of business. We turned everything on its head. We said, okay, instead of making a long form podcast, let's do a short, fast, practical podcast, lesson-based podcast.

5:19That's when we scrapped the first podcast and launched the$100 MBA show in August of 2014. Instead of giving up, I pivoted. I learned from my mistakes. I realized what I was doing wrong and I tried something different. I I made my episodes short and practical. I focused on real, actual lessons. I made it a daily show at the time. It was daily, every single day, to build momentum. And it took off. Today, the 100RBA show has over 300 million downloads and counting. We won the Best of Apple Podcasts, which is awarded to a handful of podcasts every year. It's like winning an Oscar in podcasting. I've been invited to speak on the biggest stages in the world.

5:56My life completely changed because of the success of this podcast. The lesson here, the first version might not work. It might not actually even look like it even has hope. It can completely be a failure like my podcast was. But it will teach you what you need to do. And if you could absorb that blow and just be honest with yourself and just be like, okay, that was horrible. That was bad. I hated it. What can I learn from this? What do I need to do now? What has it taught me? Let's get to failure number two. The DI webinar guide. This is a guide that nobody bought, right? I believed in webinars so much that I wanted to create a powerful tool, a course, a program to help people run webinars more effectively, how to put all the pieces together, all the technology together to make it happen.

6:47I mean, this is 2014, so there's not a lot of webinar software out there. You had to, you know, hodgepodge your landing page software and email marketing software and the streaming software and then the recording of the webinar had to go somewhere and then you have to put that on a page. You had the chat separate. It's all a mess. So I spent months making the DIY webinar guide. I thought it was a brilliant idea to help people. I made video lessons. I created templates and worksheets and everything. And I built a sales page and I launched it. And then I got two sales. And one of them was a chargeback, meaning somebody used a fake credit card or a fraudulent credit card.

7:21The other one was a sympathy sale from a friend of mine, John Lee Dumas. Shout out to you, John. But why did it fail? People didn't want to learn how to build a webinar. They wanted a tool to do it for them. I learned that the hard way. No one wants to do the work. No one wants to do what I was doing every single week. They didn't want education. They wanted a software. And that's when it realized, okay, I need to actually pivot the implementation of my idea. Instead of forcing the course to work, instead of saying, okay, maybe I need to change my pricing. No, it was obvious to me that when nobody bought like that, you know, just a sympathy to sale from a friend, that this is not what the market wants.

8:00I asked myself empowering questions like, what if I built a software that people actually wanted that made it easy to run a webinar? And that's how Webinar Ninja was born. Instead of selling education, I built the actual tool that does it for them. I launched the first version of Webinar Ninja in just a few months. It was rough. It had bugs, but people still wanted it. I improved it based on feedback. And over time, the users started to grow and grow. And I gave them what they needed because I was listening to my users. We iterated. We improved. And over 30 ,000 businesses have run webinars on Webinar Ninja.

8:36It made millions of dollars. And it's helped so many people. It became such a valuable product and tool that we were approached and we got acquired recently last year by ProProfs, who acquired Webinar Ninja, and now is growing that software even bigger. That acquisition changed my life forever financially. And it just was crazy that it all happened because of a failure. Sometimes failure is just pointing you towards the right direction, towards the right idea. It tells you don't do this. So how do you turn your own failures into success? I call this turning failure into fuel. Stop seeing failure as the end.

9:17It's the beginning. Every failure is just feedback. So use it. If somebody gives you feedback, use it, consider it, figure out how you can implement it. Next, listen to what your failures are telling you. Have an open mind. Don't have an ego, right? One of the biggest lessons I've learned in my entrepreneurial career of over 20 years is that you got to check your ego at the door. You can't have any ego when it comes to trying to get to success. You got to be okay with understanding hey, you're not perfect. You make mistakes. So listen to your failures and figure out where's the gap? What do people actually need?

9:55Because it's obviously not this. Next, don't perfect. Launch, learn, and improve. You can't optimize what doesn't exist, okay? Get the first version out. If people are happy to buy the first version, that means you're onto something. That means that even though it has flaws, people will still buy. Guys, the first iPhone didn't have an app store. Okay, you couldn't download any apps into the phone, but people still bought it because it was still great, even though it didn't have an app store. Next, trust that failure is a part of the process. When you hit a failure, understand that no great business starts flawless, right?

10:31This is just a rite of passage. It gets great over time. Here's the funny thing about failure. Failure is actually a shortcut to success because you're trying, you're doing things. A lot of people don't try. They don't put themselves out there. They delay, they delay, they delay. They try to perfect in their own little home lab. And then they never put it out there because they don't want to be judged and they don't want to fail. They have that fear of failure. But if you just put something out there and learn from that failure, it's actually fast tracking your success. If I never failed my first podcast, if that first podcast didn't flop, the$100 NBA show wouldn't exist.

11:05It just wouldn't. And I'm so glad that it actually failed miserably because if it was an okay show, they did all right. It did good enough for me to keep kind of doing it. I would probably not have this podcast. But because it failed miserably, I had to do something. So grateful that it did fail. It just torpedoed and failed miserably. I'm so grateful for that. If I never failed at that DIY webinar course, Webinar Ninja wouldn't be here. It wouldn't be in the world. It wouldn't have been part of my journey. It wouldn't have changed my life. Failure isn't just part of the journey. It is the journey.

11:38So if you're struggling right now, If you're feeling that things aren't working, keep going. The lessons you're going to learn through those failures, the things you're learning today are the foundations of your future success. Here's the crazy thing. When I look back at my career as an entrepreneur so far, I look back at the failures and the struggles with so much love, with so much feelings of pride because I survived them. I went through them. I realized it wasn't the end. Those are the things I'm proud of. It's not actually the wins. It's not actually the successes. Those are great, by the way.

12:17Don't get me wrong. Love having those. But it's the fact that I had the struggles that give the success meaning. So your failures don't define you. What you do with them does. Thanks so much for listening to The$100 MBA Show. Listen, if you're serious about building a business, you're going to want to join my Three Things newsletter. Every week, I send you three things. One, something to think about, something that will shift your mindset. Two, something to do, an actual step to grow your business. And number three, something to learn, a valuable resource to keep you ahead. It's completely free, and it's my way of coaching you from afar.

12:56Just go to 100mba.net and sign up for any of our free guides, and you'll be automatically added to our Three Things newsletter. And you'll get them every week. If this episode has helped you, you could do two things. subscribe and share it with somebody who needs to hear this. I'm Omar Zinhome, and I'll see you in the next episode.