My 2021 business failures and what I learnt from them.

My first business

In 2020, at the late age of 25, I decided to launch my first side business: a book publishing company! My goal was to translate and publish books from English to French which haven’t yet been translated. What you need is just to hire a translator, pay him for his work and then publish the book and you get the sales’ money for life. An awesome idea, right ?

I started straight by creating a company and a bank account and funded the company with £5k. I already had a book in mind, so I just created a company website to get some credibility and then posted a job offer on a translator forum. After spending a lot of time reviewing emails and resumes (got more than 500 applications!), looking at translating tests and doing phone interviews, I finally hired a translator. So she is doing the job right now, she’s translating the book and all I have to do is to publish and to market it, and after that all the lifetime time money for me. When you think about it, I’m spending like 3k to get a book translated and then I’ll be spending 2k on advertising so that’s 5k of cost. Now what is the probability to you of making any of that money back ? Well it’s quite low indeed, at £5 an ebook, I need to sell 1000 copies of the book and that’s going to require some serious marketing. Oh and btw I have no knowledge in marketing and it’s just a side business, ‘cos I’ve got a full time job. Looks like this is all going to end badly right?

Selling books or investing in crypto?

Now let’s compare this business investment with a 5k investment in any cryptocurrency be it bitcoin or any shitcoin for that matter. The downside is the same: I can lose it all. What about the upside ? Well, it’s unlimited as well, as the coin could skyrocket to the moon. Do I have more probability of selling a lot of books during my entire life than for a given crypto to skyrocket ? Not too sure… And another important point: it can take my entire life to make my investment back by selling books, while it could take 1 week or even 1 day to make my investment back (and more) in crypto…

Lesson#1

So what did I learn from this? I learnt that before actually starting a project, you should just look and compare other investments or project ideas with that project. You should compare the initial cost, the potential upside, as well as how long it takes before you get any of that money back. It’s not only about the percentage of return because if a project returns 100% but over a 20 years horizon then it’s very bad compared to doing 50% in only one year. So following that mistake what I did is I created a table where I list all the project ideas I have and I have multiple columns as comparison criteria:

Second business idea

Another business idea that failed was when a friend of mine asked me to help him launch a newsletter on a niche subject: second hand guitars. I would take care of the technical part (scrapping guitar prices from forums and websites to find good deals and automating the writing and sending of the newsletter) while he would do the marketing and find customers. I liked the idea and started straight to spend some nights writing a python script to do all of that. I spent hours writing code and it was ready within a few weeks. We did catch up and I asked him how he was doing on the email part, if we were ready to ship our first newsletter or not, I was so excited!
“Shipping it to who ?” Indeed, we had no clients and maybe that newsletter was not really solving any pain point for anyone. We should have first started to conduct user interviews to find our product market fit. That requires considerable time and my friend did not want to commit that time so we gave up the project. I felt very silly to have spent so much time writing code for a product that we did not even launch. That’s a big thing I think.

Lesson#2

I learnt two things from this experience:

1. Before doing anything, before creating your first product, before writing a single line of code, create quickly a dummy product and conduct user interviews to see if there is a market for your product.
2. Before starting to work on a project with other team members, make sure they are committed and understand the time commitment. You don’t want to do your part and finally give up on the project because your associates are not committed.

Last words

Starting a business is far from being as easy as we may think and there are some smart things to do before actually committing time, energy and resources to a project. Above are two of my failures from early 2021. Maybe more will come and I will update this article.