Why are startup failures never celebrated?

There is a consistent set of factors that lead to startup success and failure.

I thought I had a pretty good explanation of success and failure, but wondered if my observations were supported by hard data and detailed case studies, and my curiosity around startup success and failure eventually got the better of me. I dug deep, researched as much as I could, read a lot of papers by research institutions, but I never found a rich, full-length story of a startup. Its everyday journey. The best I could find were the glorified stories of successful startup founders and how they scaled up. Startup successes and failures have largely remained a black box.

All the struggles — the rejections from VCs, the heartaches of losing a great employee to a rival, the arguments about pricing, the betrayals from co-founders, the rumours about your bias towards an employee, the failure of your pre-release surveys, the criticism from clients, the perennially empty bank account, the small wins of the first 100 signups, the nervousness of pre-launch day, the long nights spent on bug fixing, the happiness of seeing good reviews from customers and all those lonely nights trying to make their vision a reality — have rarely been documented in full colour.

As entrepreneurs we succeed and fail every single day. But the important thing is that we get up every time we fall and learn from it. And while we go through all the emotion and effort to make things happen, as a community, there’s limited cumulative learning. Most founders try to re-invent the wheel again and again.

Inspired by Hiten Shah, we thought we ought to do a “behind the curtain” view of a campaign to launch and scale a product(hopefully) so that the new founders don’t make the same mistakes again. You hear a few success stories. You hear even fewer failure stories. Very few people share about their failures. It’s embarrassing. You feel you will be judged. But if you don’t analyse and document your failures, you will never learn from them.

As we launch a new AI-powered CRM, for the next 12 months we will share our story with you. The behind-the-scenes preview as we develop our product and try to scale it up. You’ll see how we iterate landing pages, do market research, define personas of our audience, craft messages and reach out to our target audience. You will see how we go about hiring in as much detail as you see how we went about choosing our tech stack and tools. I will break down every process within every single research exercise and the learning from each of them, whether we fail or succeed. It will be as raw as it can be.

We aren’t doing this for traffic and we aren’t doing this for traction. But, why do we want to share our story with you? We just want to document our learning so that the next generation of entrepreneurs don’t make the same mistakes.

Starting a new company? Thinking of new product? Struggling to hire newer people? If anyone on your team is responsible for anything related to product or technology or or marketing or hiring or probably anything, you probably want to share this with them.

We would be glad and indebted if, during the course of this journey, you would like to participate in any way. A comment on our research methodology, a pat on the back for our product launch framework, all would mean a lot to us.

We will kick off next week and look forward to engaging with you in the coming months.

Why are startup failures never celebrated? was originally published in Hacker Noon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.