My Most Successful Failure

I went back to the office trembling. I had no clue what I was going to do. I was not prepared to start a new company. I still loved Sooligan, no matter how difficult of a baby it was being. I decided to take a walk. In that moment, I remember wanting to die. I felt so stupid. My company was going to fail, and I would have to explain to everyone that I was such a failure. I would have to tell my mom that she was right, I should have become an attorney after all. I saw a large truck coming down the road towards me and thought to myself “I should jump in front of it. I’m completely useless anyways.” I wandered aimlessly to an outdoor courtyard that was adjacent to our coworking space. I don’t think I actually realized that people inside could see outside. I sat down on the bench and felt overwhelmed with sadness and disappointment. All of my hard work, all of my dreams of being a unicorn was over. I had no other good ideas. I was a loser. I began to weep. Not cry. Weep. I felt so ashamed. After about 10 minutes of crying, someone sat down next to me. It was a fellow female founder from one of the other startups in my program. She held on to me and let me cry on her shoulder. Between sobs, I told her what had just happened. She was very still and quiet, then said “For the last few years, I owned a restaurant. It was my pride and joy. I had several employees that worked for me and they were wonderful. But our restaurant was losing money and I finally decided to shut it down. Letting go those people, my team, and knowing I was impacting their families was a horrible feeling. I wanted to die too. I stayed in bed for 6 months and couldn’t do anything but binge watch Netflix. But guess what? Because of my binge-watching, I started PlatypusTV (a platform to allow streaming customers to chat with others watching the show at the same time). Now I’m doing something I love even more than that restaurant. You will have more great ideas. You will start another company. You will do even better in this next company because you learned so much from this company. Life doesn’t end here. This is just a new chapter.” She was soooo positive that I couldn’t help but feel inspired. Her energy was infectious.

I got up from the bench and went home. I texted Stedmon Harper and Ajae Dandrige, our two marketing interns that had worked for Sooligan in the past. Stedmon had shown promise as an innovator and executor. He always had good ideas and was able to solve any problem presented to him. Ajae was a master organizer and operator. She could coordinate anything, and I knew if I was going to start a new company by the end of the week, I would need her help to get it off the ground. I told the two of them the situation and they both replied that they were available to do a Google Hangout that evening to discuss some options for new companies. The three of us join the Google Hangout and begin brainstorming ideas for a new company. At some point, Ajae says “I wish we could send out a survey to people to see what people want to use. I see surveys everywhere. They’re on the back of every receipt, like the Subway receipts.” As soon as she said surveys, it was like a lightbulb clicked inside of me and I knew I had to get into the survey business. I replied “That’s what we should do. We should make surveys better. They ARE on every receipt, and I take them because I want to get free food. But they are super long and annoying, and they are hard to use on cell phones. We should make them more mobile friendly.” I told the team that I would do some market research on this and go through all of our receipts to check out if the surveys were indeed difficult to use. I took 26 surveys that night, and all of them were long and archaic with radio buttons for days. I sent the team a deck of 26 screenshots of surveys on my cell phone and all of them were really horrible. With a mission in place, Stedmon and Ajae decided to come immediately to New York to work on this new survey company with me. Sted decided to drive his car up from Arkansas so we would have a way to get around. Ajae would fly in from New Orleans. When they arrived, Sted had a passenger with him named BK Simmons. Apparently, BK had heard about the idea for this new company as Stedmon made his goodbye rounds and told him he wasn’t going to start this company without him. BK volunteered to help out as needed for anything. He quit his job on the drive up to NY.

The next day we began conceptualizing what this new survey company would be and decided that whatever it is, it needed to be able to ask a lot of questions in a short amount of time. Our goal was to get 10 questions asked in less than 60 seconds because research found that most people don’t want to take a survey for more than 3 minutes but the average survey completion time was 7 minutes because researchers seemed to always want to ask 25 questions. We sketched out some concepts and realized that the only way our 10 questions in 60 seconds would work was if the surveys were game-like. They wouldn’t be actual games but they would be designed using game theory, which incorporates fun and a highly interactive user experience. After some white boarding, BK commented that “if we are going to do games, they have to be in color. We should assign color to different things.” From there, that’s how we decided that color needed to be assigned to the ratings because it would make feedback easier to provide. The founder of Cheeburger Cheeburger stopped by to check out the startups in the program the following day. He was an angel investor as well. We didn’t have a name for the company yet so we pitched the idea for this new gammified survey platform. He loved it and asked me how much it was. I told him $1,000 for 3 months. He gave me his business card, and wrote down the email for his CMO. He told me to email the CMO right away because they would be interested in being a customer. I couldn’t believe my ears. We weren’t in business for 24 hours yet and already had our first paying customer. We had more revenue in that first 24 hours than I had made for the entire 3 years I worked on Sooligan. I realized we must be on to something. The director of the program, who had given me until the end of the week to come up with a new idea, loved the idea as well.