Fail Like a Champion: Rebooting Your Product and Your Life After it Tanks

Imagine you spend three years pouring your heart into an idea. You break your back working on it every day. You sacrifice family time, fun…

Imagine you spend three years pouring your heart into an idea. You break your back working on it every day. You sacrifice family time, fun with friends, dinner and drinks with the neighbors. Hell, you sacrifice part of your sanity. You’ve spent thousands of hours you can’t ever get back.

Then one day you’re ready to roll. It’s time to start selling. Everything you’ve worked so hard for all comes down to this moment. You’ve got something people can’t live without. Your life is about to change. Big time.

You can see the white hot sales figures in your mind. Where will you go when you make your first million dollars? The Caribbean? Hiking in the Andes? A safari? Will you buy a Tesla? What will it feel like to tell your boss “I’m quitting, forever. See ya.”

Then you launch and you fall flat on your face. Hard.

It happened to me.

It still hurts so bad that I hate to write those words. It’s as if just admitting it will bring all those feelings of failure and worthlessness and doubt roaring back. They’ll overwhelm me again and send me spiraling back into a nasty depression.

But they won’t. Because I went through the process of rebooting my life and my product and you can too.

Here’s how to start over.

Give Yourself Time

First off, you need some time to heal. Give yourself that time. Be depressed. Get drunk. Get high. Eat ice cream. Binge watch some shows on Netflix and wonder why you’re still watching them at three in the morning.

Just go right ahead and feel sorry for yourself. Seriously.

People will tell you, you can skip this step. Just chant some affirmations and visualize your goals! Get motivated. Get pumped. Get back in the saddle.

Yeah right. It’s a lie. It’s complete and total bullshit.

Anyone who tells you different is selling you something, usually a motivational seminar or book that will last you a few days before you crash right back down. Now is not the time for some rah-rah self-help book. That comes later.

Today, it’s time to go through the trough of despair. Feel sorry for yourself. Be depressed. Be sad.

Trying to beat back the sadness with affirmations is no better than drugs or alcohol. Really. It’s the same thing. You have to experience the adversity. Embrace the pain. Instead of turning away from it, you have to do the very thing you don’t want to do: surrender and turn into it.

The only way out is through.

Realize You’re Not Alone

I’ll be honest, knowing this usually doesn’t help me at first. I know others have gone through it but it’s like when my parents told me to eat all the food on my plate because there were starving kids in Africa. Great, I thought, so it can get worse? How is that supposed to help?

But the fact is, every entrepreneur fails eventually, usually multiple times. They just don’t like to talk about it. In “The Dark Side of Entrepreneurship” Michelle Nickolaisen notes that “entrepreneurial swagger is often a thin veneer masking crippling self-doubt, insecurity, and fear of catastrophic failure. The more successful you are, the more people depend on you, and the more is at stake if you fail.

If you feel like you’re living on the edge of a knife, you are not alone.”

Hardship hits everyone. There’s no escaping it.

Remember that quote from Michael Jordan: “I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”

Even still, reading something like that, we don’t really believe it. Deep down, we want to think we’re different, that it won’t happen to us, that we’re special.

But the best thing in the world is realizing that you’re not. It’s very freeing. You have to go through it like everyone else.

And you know what?

You can.

Figure Out What You Screwed Up

So now that you’ve embraced your depression, it’s time to crawl your way out of it. Go through it, but go through it as fast as possible.

When you fail, you did something wrong, usually multiple things. You missed something. Even if there were circumstances beyond your control, forget them. Figure out the things you could control that you didn’t get right. Believe me, they’re there.

This is the hardest part for so many reasons. You have to admit you were wrong and nobody likes to do that. You have to see clearly. That’s much harder than it seems.

We’re wired to see what we want to see but to move forward you have to see things as they actually are, not as you want them to be or wish they were.

Maybe my own screws-ups will prove instructive for you. You may be launching an app, a clothing line, a board game or a book. Doesn’t matter. The process is the same.

I botched the launch of my latest book series, an epic Chinese civil war novel called The Jasmine Wars, where China rises up in revolution, hurls off the chains of communism and becomes the world’s first Direct Democracy and the light of the world.

It’s a good premise, one that sci-fi readers should eat up. The book is filled with larger-than-life characters, high stakes and exotic locations. It’s like a mashup of Winds of War, the Godfather and Starship Troopers. I spent three years reading hundreds of books, traveling to China and banging on the keyboard every day. Early on, I adopted the mantra “there ain’t no steps you can skip.” When my characters trekked into the mountains and met a tribal group of mountain people and I realized I didn’t know anything about those people I would stop. I’d read two obscure books on indigenous mountain culture and then I’d go back to writing, armed with authentic knowledge and history. I did everything to make the book as powerful as possible so the story would live with readers for years to come.

But when it came to launching the book, I skipped all kinds of steps.

I started off well enough. I joined Mark Dawson’s excellent course on advertising for authors and spent months interacting with successful writers selling hundreds of thousands of copies. I started building my mailing list with a contest and a giveaway. I built a private Facebook group for my most dedicated fans. I tried all kinds of advertising and I had ads that worked, that drove people to sign up for the list. I hired a PR firm to do a big publicity stunt to kick the book into the stratosphere.

I couldn’t wait to launch. I was ready.

But I wasn’t.

The mistakes started to pile up fast.

I had a dedicated group of fans but not big enough to really get the word out. I got some fantastic early reviews but not enough to provide truly strong social proof. So when that first unfathomable one star review came screaming in, as it inevitably does, it stood out like a sore thumb. It didn’t matter that the reviewer didn’t bother to read past page five. When you have hundreds of reviews nobody notices a bad one, but I only had a few.

I also didn’t build my list big enough, so I got opening day sales but not enough to trigger the Amazon algorithms to notice me. Instead of a big launch and steady sales after, I had a nice spike in sales only to come crashing down.

No problem though. I still had the publicity stunt to really get my name out there. Right?

Except my PR firm, Von Hughes, disappeared.

They took $8000 of my money, stopped responding to emails and never bothered to build me a website or kick off the PR campaign.

You might remember them. They’re the kids who “hacked the media” and launched a fake “Tinder for fights” app called Rumblr. I loved their swagger and their willingness to take an unorthodox approach to PR. But I should have vetted them a bit more. They’re just a couple of young kids out of NYC. They probably got bored, realized they couldn’t deliver or found something new and shiny to occupy their time. Or maybe they just stole my money and never intended to do the campaign anyway? Maybe hiring someone because they’re good at scamming the media should have been a red flag that they’d be good at scamming other people too?

Either way, it doesn’t matter because I was screwed. I had no big PR campaign, no fast launch to my mail list, and not enough reviews.

The hardest part is admitting that it’s my fault.

I should have waited to launch until I’d built my list even bigger. I should have found a reputable PR firm. I should have listened to Gary V and gone for a more consistent long-term strategy of authentic, honest engagement with people and fans, instead of trying to shoot to the top with some stupid stunt.

So now I have my list of mistakes. It’s up to you to figure out yours and be as honest as possible. List them in no uncertain terms. Be brutally honest. Figure out what you did wrong. Make a new plan.

Start Over

Now is the time for that rah-rah self-help book. Affirmations? Motivational speeches? Visualization? Goal setting? Yeah! Whatever. Soak it up. Get pumped. It’s time to boost yourself back to productivity.

I have to admit I’m not a big self-help reader. I used to read self-help books all the time but I fell out of love with them. Maybe you’re like me and you find all that motivational stuff kind of cheese-ball. You don’t really believe that people are motivated and happy all the time because, well, they aren’t.

But here’s the deal. Now is not the time for existential doubt. It’s time to talk yourself up, get back in the saddle and get your ass in gear again.

So find someone who speaks to you. Maybe you love Tony Robbins and his infectiously goofy smile? Fine. Go ahead and Awaken the Giant Within. Or maybe you need a dose of tough New York style love from Gary Vaynerchuck? Great. Or if you’re an artist you can’t go wrong with the classic ass-kicking The War of Art. Just pick one and get started.

For me I like motivational gurus with some humor and a willingness to cut through the bullshit and get real. Tell me the truth. Don’t give me a bunch of platitudes and fake techniques handed down by snake-oil salesmen and dime store hustlers. This time around I found You are a Badass. I love the title and I love author Jen Sincero’s funny, engaging and sarcastic style. It works for me. Find one that works for you. If it doesn’t, throw it down and start another one.

Hell, you don’t even have to read the books cover to cover. You just need enough cheer-leading to get off your ass and get back to work.

Make a Plan and Take Action

Once you figure out what went wrong, it’s time to take action.

Luckily, my product has no shelf life. It won’t go bad. Plenty of books did not start off kicking ass. Game of Thrones barely sold any copies at first. It wasn’t until the third book that it took off.

I decided to relaunch my book and that’s coming in mid to late February. I took everything I learned and I rolled it into a new plan. For example, everyone on my list was pumped to read The Jasmine Wars but since it’s quite long, some of them were intimidated and waited to get started so they could really commit to it. To fix that I’m dividing the book at a natural stopping point, writing a new prologue for the second part and cleaning up a few chapters that nagged me. That will allow me to give something away (the first book) and still leave something for people to buy. Today’s readers want a series to get into more than anything else. I plan to give them what they want.

After that I’m kicking off a new giveaway of some awesome prizes that fit my reader’s clusters of interests like a Kindle Paperwhite, the Deus Ex Mankind Divided Collector’s Edition video game and the Blade Runner Blu-ray box set. That will help me get my list going again. By the way, if you want to pop on the list now, you will get a copy of my first book, The Scorpion Game, absolutely free and I’ll enter you in the new sweepstakes, so you’ve got nothing to lose and possibly a Kindle to win!

I also realized a lot of readers in my genre love audio books, so I sprang for an amazing pro narrator Leanne Yau, a whip-smart British Chinese woman who can speak fluent Mandarin and Cantonese, a must for the various languages woven into the book. She’s been incredible, spending six hours a day on her performance. Even better she’s helped me fall in love with my own work again when I hear it come to life in her incredibly capable hands. I can’t wait to get that in front of people.

Next, I’m looking to hire the lovely cosplayer Vampy Bit Me (potentially NSFW) to do a promotional shoot for the book. When someone has 350,000 fans on Instagram, they’re doing something right. She’s a super cool geek girl, who actually loves the material she represents and to top it off she’s badass enough to build her own costumes. I expect to reach out to her in the next few weeks.

Lastly, I’m working on building my readership right here on Medium. To do that I’ve concentrated on exposing some of my own vulnerability and telling the truth as I see it. It’s starting to pay off. My latest article Learning AI If You Suck At Math brought me 300+ new followers (hey guys!) and currently has 700+ recommends. I believe folks responded to it because a lot of them are in the same boat. They want to learn about AI, but they struggled with math just like me.

So that is the “formula.” Show a little vulnerability. Share. Connect. Sounds easy, but it’s not because nobody likes to feel vulnerable. Inevitably someone will pounce on that and think we’re jerks/wrong/stupid/ugly or whatever. I’m doing it anyway and you should too.

Not every article will be a hit for me, but this is a marathon not a sprint. I will continue to publish in my two favorite publications, Hacker Noon and Art+ Marketing, as well as anywhere else that wants to have my stories. Just email me and let me know if I can help your publication get some eyeballs. It’s a win-win.

Bringing It All Together

More than anything I learned one thing from this process:

You can’t skip steps. Ever.

I already “knew” that, but I didn’t really. I only knew it in one area of my life: my writing. I know how to write a good story because I put in my 10,000 hours. But I still had to learn the lesson in other aspects of my life. Lessons don’t always transfer. When you succeed in one area it’s easy to think you can skip the hardships and setbacks in another area of life. You can’t. Nobody starts at the top. Zen mind, beginner mind is the only way to approach something new, like marketing yourself.

They say the fool hears the truth a million times and never gets it. The wise man only has to hear it a 100,000 times before he gets it. It’s not easy.

There are no overnight successes. It’s a myth. J.K. Rowling spent five years writing her book in coffee shops, while working another job and taking care of her kid. Then she had to face rejection after rejection. That’s just the way of it. Maybe some folks get lucky early in life and their first project takes off like a rocket, but the next thing they try eats it hard. Failure comes in many forms but make no mistake: It will come.

You have to deliver content that people want. But that’s not enough. A lot of great content never sees the light of day. You have to find a way to break through the noise. That’s hard but it’s doable, if you’re willing to be honest with yourself and learn from your mistakes.

Nobody gets anywhere trying to BS their way to the top. That was my mistake. Hiring some scam artists to try to trick my way into the spotlight is never as good as opening the kimono and sharing the painful little pieces of wisdom that I earned through hard work and self-discovery.

You have to build your audience one person at a time. And you have to do it with integrity. I won’t ever forget that again.

This article is just one more step for me. Welcome to my little world. I appreciate you being here and taking the time to let me talk with you and share a little of my life.

So what’s your story? Got a product to reboot?

What are you waiting for?

Get mad. Get sad. Get clear on what you screwed up. Make a plan. Get motivated. Get going again.

I believe in you. Now you just have to believe in yourself again.

You can do it.

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A bit about me: I’m an author, engineer and serial entrepreneur. During the last two decades, I’ve covered a broad range of tech from Linux to virtualization and containers. You can check out my latest novel, an epic Chinese sci-fi civil war saga where China throws off the chains of communism and becomes the world’s first direct democracy, running a highly advanced, artificially intelligent decentralized app platform with no leaders. You can also check out the Cicada open source project based on ideas from the book that outlines how to make that tech a reality right now and you can get in on the beta.