My First Failure

My first product was a HUGE flop.

I launched it in 2010 and I think that to this day it’s still sold less than ten copies.

Hardly a product you can pay the bills with.

It was a notebook designed for sound engineers based on these old studio track sheets old school recording engineers would use to keep track of things in the studio.

Every page had a handy tip at the bottom and plenty of space to take notes.

Turns out, I was making an analog product for a digital audience.

Nobody needed to take notes on paper when they could just type everything into their software instead.

So you could call it a failure, but it was honestly an amazing learning experience.

First of all, I learned what people didn’t want. That was good, I was only 999 ways from making my lightbulb work.

But more importantly, I learned skills that would come in handy in the rest of my entrepreneurial journey:

• Finding contractors and outsourcing design work
• Discovering print-on-demand services
• Creating sales pages (even if they didn’t sell…)
• Launching a product via email