If We Don’t Do It Someone Else Will

If We Don’t Do It Someone Else WillAnd they did and we didn’t

And they did and we didn’t

I talk a lot about the times I have failed and even failed to launch products in the past. This is another one of those stories. If you don’t want to read the whole thing — here it is : we sucked.

High School: Two other friends and I had another “brilliant” idea … we wanted to use credit card transactions as a means to raise money for charity. The concept was pretty simple, “round-up” the payments and donate that money to charitable causes. We wanted to connect “under-exposed” causes to donors across the GLOBE, and we would take a small percentage of each transaction.

Boom. Easy enough.

Hah. It never happened. We were complacent and did not build quickly enough. In fact, we made a bunch of progress over the first couple of days. We talked to potential customers and got advice from a mentor…but then nothing happened. We stopped…why?

This thing called LIFE got in the way.

We must have been really naive to think a couple of different things (that I know now):

• We would gain immediate utility from building this product. We, for some dumb reason or another, thought that we were going to grow quickly…Why the hell would we? It would take a boat load of work that we were frankly not prepared for.
• We were not ready to give up a lot to get a little. We were not prepared to make sacrifices.

These two lessons are super important and I have taken these to my successes. Just goes to show how you can learn a lot by screwing up. You just learn more when you actually do things right.

PS —someone else actually executed on the same idea! Go support them.

Drops // Roundup Spare Change for Charity
Drops is a smartphone app that lets you roundup credit/debit card purchases and donate the spare change to the charity…drops.la

By jordangonen on June 4, 2016.

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Exported from Medium on February 17, 2018.