Not everybody thinks this is a good thing, however. Jason Fried of 37 Signals, for example, is certainly not a fan of the failcult:

I don’t understand the cultural fascination with failure being the source of great lessons to be learned. What did you learn? You learned what didn’t work. Now you won’t make the same mistake twice, but you’re just as likely to make a different mistake next time. You might know what won’t work, but you still don’t know what will work. That’s not much of a lesson.

And he’s right that there is an important perception gap here to worry about. After all, worshipping failure is only worthwhile if you assume that it is a precursor to success. Yet logic says that there are no guarantees that a person who fails once, twice or even three times is any more likely to strike gold on their next attempt. Sometimes you learn from your mistakes, sure. But sometimes people just aren’t good enough to make the cut.

What’s interesting to me about the industry attitude to failure, though, is the way it is spoken about all the time and yet rarely truthfully examined. While the Silicon Valley truism says “fail early, fail often” is often bandied about as a good thing, it’s actually surprisingly rare for people to talk openly and honestly about the details of getting it wrong. And considering the proportion of companies and ideas that have run into the wall, you might expect there to be a massive volume of people laying it all bare and talking about their mistakes.

That’s why I was so interested in three stories I came upon this week that dealt with failures in a way that was refreshing: openly, honestly, candidly.

‘Swallow your pride’

First, Justin Hall published a long and detailed of the ups and downs of his online games company, GameLayers, which shut down in 2009. Justin, a web veteran, blogger and journalist, started his business around an intriguing idea: building a layer on top of the Web that turned your daily Internet consumption into a game. It’s what they called “passively multiplayer online gaming” — players would gain points for visiting certain sites, find treasure on one page or set trap for a rival on another.

Over the course of its life, the business raised $2 million from a mixture of angels and venture capital firms, but struggled to achieve success with initial idea. As things came to head, it made a last-ditch effort to save itself by switching to the rapidly expanding world of making Facebook games — but that only lasted for a short period before the company shut down altogether.

Justin’s account is a straight-shooting, sometimes tough, sometimes whimsical look at what it took to be CEO and where things went right and wrong. Among the problems: the idea required too much engineering, they realized they had sunk a lot of money into infrastructure costs, they got stuck on a few staffing problems and monetization wasn’t baked in enough. But in the end it was really an execution problem — the idea was fun, but it wasn’t fun enough, and nobody had the presence of mind or understanding to realize it.

Looking back I believe we needed to clear the decks, swallow our pride, and make something that was easier to have fun with, within the first few moments of interaction. That may have meant scrapping “passively multiplayer” as a game concept, or a toolbar as the mode of interaction. Those were pretty core to our initial business plan, so it took us a long time to see those concepts through to revenue failure.

His experiences chimed with another story I read earlier this week from Finnish entrepreneur Joakim Achren.

‘Never stop trying new things out’

Achren’s business, Ironstar, was also in games and followed a similar trajectory. The company shut down last month, and Achren published a short eulogy on his blog that bears a strong relation to. Like GameLayers, Ironstar began by making its own ambitious platform before switching to Facebook games — only to find that early success was hard to keep up.

“We can only blame ourselves for this, since we mostly focused on monetization first, retention second.” he lamented. “New features were aimed at paying users and less at the masses. Soon we had a game that didn’t monetize that well any more.”

‘Is it over yet?’

Then, still thinking of games, I came across this wonderful piece on Kotaku about the failure of a Facebook game called Cow Clicker. The game was designed by academic and games author Ian Bogost, who intended it to be a parody of the mindless grinding games that have proven so popular.

His brand of failure, it turns out, was to be too successful. Cow Clicker was meant to be a joke: instead it became something of a phenomenon. Thousands of people played, yet many of them did not understand that they were part of a joke. In the words of the article the game “developed an active player base — people who missed the humor and attached to it as if it were a “real” game.” And the more he tried to mess with them, the more they kept going.

What a sadistic version of success he had unleashed upon himself.

OK, here’s where Tiger Woods comes into it

I am not entirely sure what lessons other people can learn from these failures, especially since they seem so disparate. Yes, they all concern games — but the nature of their failures are very different. One was not monetized enough; another was monetized too much. Two of them didn’t get enough players, one of them got too many. It’s a muddle.

But whatever lessons you draw, these three tales struck me as honest discussions of failure in a world where we usually kid ourselves about it. We all hear about failure, but we don’t expect it to happen to us.

Perhaps there’s good reason for our self-deception though. Perhaps it’s a form of mental delusion we must have if we are ever going to really succeed.

This dual state is something that the British writer and former Olympian Matthew Syed refers to in his book Bounce as a version of Orwellian doublethink. In sport, he suggests, champions have to believe completely and utterly that they are going to succeed: that they will beat their rivals, that they will land that shot, that they will make that catch. And yet, they also know that failure is highly likely — and they have to be prepared to deal with it, because not everybody can win.

[top coach Timothy Gallwey] advises the golfer to associate a difficult putt with some action that has never failed, such as simply picking a ball out of the hole. “By vividly associating with this easy act, there is no room left in the mind to associate the upcoming putt with failure,” he writes.

But any sensible golfer — including Gallwey and, for that matter, Tiger Woods — must putt with caution; he must putt in such a way that, in the event of a miss, the ball rolls only a couple of feet past the hole, so that the next shot is a tap-in.

So what Gallwey is really saying is that a successful golfer must attempt to create subjective certainty in his own mind that he will make the putt, while simultaneously playing it at such a pace that acknowledges the possibility that he might miss; he must executive a shot that is certain to drop in a way that concedes the possibility of failure.

Startups are much the same. When we talk about failure, we visualize success. Anyone starting a company juggles these two things in their mind without ever necessarily acknowledging them. The same doublethink that made Tiger Woods a great golfer is precisely the sort of mental delusion that great entrepreneurs also have.

And even now, after reading all of this, I am not sure if that mindset is part of the magic, or part of the problem.

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The company’s stock dropped 58.33 percent to $0.18 per share, and as Forbes points out, will likely soon be worthless. Evergreen Solar also said:

“Based upon the estimated value of the Company’s assets, the assets are expected to be insufficient to satisfy all its obligations to its creditors.”

Bloomberg reports that Evergreen has assets valued at $424.5 million and as many as 5,000 creditors, and owes creditors $485.6 million.

Evergreen has long been struggling to get its debt in line, and turn around increasing losses. For the first quarter of the year, Evergreen reported a net loss of $33.37 million, and for the fourth quarter of 2010, lost another $410.95 million.

Evergreen made a lot of news earlier this year when the company closed a factory in Devens, Mass., and cut hundreds of jobs. The factory was supported by state subsidies.

The company says day-to-day business will still go on while they are in reorganization.

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Last month, Jonathan Nail, the writer, creator and star of the independently produced Solo, announced that he and his team would not be producing anymore episodes of the sci-fi comedy series. The blog post announcing the decision is a heartfelt thank-you letter to everyone who was involved in the show’s production, but it doesn’t go into detail about the reasons behind Nail’s decision. However, those reasons, as Nail explained during a phone interview, aren’t hard to guess: Like many who bet their time and money on creating an original series, Nail was dissatisfied with producing his own content and receiving minimal reward, and as a result he has decided to move on.

Nail was inspired to create Solo in early 2009, after seeing the success of The Guild and then discovering some of the other content being produced independently at that time. “I didn’t think it was going to be my Sling Blade,” he said (referring to the 1996 film that made Billy Bob Thornton a star), “but the concept hit me pretty strongly, and I realized I either had to put up or shut up.”

After several months of preproduction, three episodes of Solo were shot in the fall of 2009, then released in July 2010. After a second round of production, the remaining six episodes were released beginning on April 15. The total price tag, according to Nail? Approximately $20,000.

Part of that amount, $7,300, came from a crowd-sourcing campaign to fund the second round of production, and in addition, a sponsorship deal with DataDirect Networks provided funds for the show to give away five Apple TVs and an iPad. But Nail bore no small percentage of the budget, including an initial investment of $3,000, $2,500 for set construction and $2,000 for merchandise that, as of writing, remains unsold. Even Nail’s parents chipped in some cash.

Nail attempted to cut as many corners as possible. For example, he and his wife lowered the catering budget by personally cooking meals for the crew, most of whom were donating their time. But factors like travel expenses (when Solo was screened at the New York Television Festival) and paying for equipment rentals, post-production work and on-set sound guys (there is no such thing as a sound guy who works for free, at least in Los Angeles) worked against him.

Did Nail expect to make that money back? “I knew there was going to be some loss, but I was only looking at the success that The Guild was having — I wasn’t paying attention to the fact that no one is really making money in this space,” he said. “Naively, I thought that this could get picked up somewhere like SyFy and I would make some of that money back, or that the audience would support it so I wouldn’t have to invest any more of my money.” As mentioned before, the Solo audience did contribute financially to the show’s production — but the audience, despite being extremely loyal, wasn’t large enough to make that sustainable in the long term.

There were burdens beyond the financial cost, as well. One of Nail’s main reasons for creating Solo was to give him a spotlight for his acting talents (his credits include appearances on ER, Criminal Minds and Mad Men); however, he found that acting was less than 10 percent of the work involved and that producing duties were beyond what he’d anticipated.

“You have to be aware that you will be biting off more than you can chew at first,” he said. “If you want to be an actor, act. If you want to be a producer, produce. I don’t want to discourage anyone, but there’s a lot more work than you’ll expect there to be.”

One element that proved difficult was the search for sponsorship. The DataDirect deal came about through a friend who worked there and knew that the company was looking to sponsor an online series; but other efforts to find a sponsor were unsuccessful.

“Here’s the thing most people don’t understand about sponsors — they don’t deal with budgets that small, and if you can’t show them that you’ve got 100,000 views, they’re not interested in talking to you,” Nail said. “You pretty much have to have proven yourself already.”

Looking back, Nail acknowledged several issues that might have affected Solo‘s ability to reach an audience, including the gap between the first three and final six episodes that slowed the show’s momentum. But he also considered the current state of web content to be a factor.

“Web series are kind of the 99-seat theater of the entertainment world. We’re all promoting to ourselves,” he said. “It takes a lot of time and money to break out of the atmosphere of this world we’ve created.”

That said, when Nail announced the end of Solo, he was happily surprised by the outpouring of support from the web series community, much of which came from producers “who knew how hard this is.” As one producer told him, “It’s always going to be [online]. You’ll always have something to be proud of.” And he looks forward to acting in future web content — just not producing any of it himself.

One positive consequence of moving on: The Nails now have a place to park their car. Over the course of five months in 2009, Nail and his crew built the show’s primary set — the spaceship’s control room — in Nail’s garage, and it remained there until two weeks ago, when Nail and three friends finally took it down. A standing set company in Anaheim, Calif., was at one point interested in buying it, but the deal fell through; instead, Nail now has approximately $600 worth of good quality wood to use on another project. “I can use it to build a shed, or a playhouse for my girls,” he said.

“Taking down the set was very cathartic,” he added. “I had a smile on my face the whole time.”

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In March, an 8.9 earthquake and subsequent tsunami caused widespread disruptions to power supplies and network connectivity to data centers across Japan, causing Japanese companies to rethink their traditional disaster recovery strategies. Several weeks later, the EBS system in one of Amazon’s EC2 data centers in the Eastern U.S. failed due to a faulty router upgrade and a cascade of resulting events, sent hundreds of customers—including many Web 2.0 companies such as Foursquare and Reddit—scrambling in an effort to resume services.

Ironically, these events also highlight how cloud infrastructures, when managed correctly, actually provide unprecedented capabilities to deliver high availability, resiliency and business continuity in IT operations.

Planning for Failure in the Cloud

Protecting your organization from unplanned downtime is widely dependent on building redundancy and diversity directly into your disaster recovery and business continuity systems. Business systems need to be able to run on a number of different infrastructures — whether they be public clouds such as Amazon or Rackspace, or private clouds using traditional on-premise hardware — and be able to fail over between them quickly and efficiently as necessary.

Despite the Amazon outage, public clouds now provide organizations with an impressively wide array of options to implement business continuity at a level of affordability that simply did not exist a few years ago. Consider this: Right now, from my laptop, I can launch servers in a dozen disparate locations worldwide – including the U.S., Europe, and Asia – for pennies per hour. As a result, I can design a system for my business that can reasonably withstand localized outages at a lower cost than previously possible.

The key is to design your infrastructures for the possibility of failure. Amazon’s CTO Werner Vogels has been preaching this religion for many years, suggesting the only way to test the true robustness of a system is to ‘pull the plug.’ Netflix — itself a major cloud infrastructure user — has created a process it calls “the Chaos Monkey” that randomly kills running server instances and services just to make sure the overall system continues to operate well without them. Not surprisingly, Netflix’s overall operation saw little impact from the AWS U.S. East outage when it occurred.

Implementing failure-resilient systems isn’t easy. How can you quickly move your operations from one infrastructure to the next when the pressure is on and the alarm bells are ringing? How do you design a system that not only allows new compute resources to begin to operate as part of your service, but also folds in an up-to-date copy of the data your users and customers depend on?

Redundancy and Automation in the Cloud

There is, of course, no magic bullet. But there is a general approach that does work: combining redundancy in design with automation in the cloud management layer. The first step requires architecting a solution that uses components that can withstand failures of individual nodes, whether those are servers, storage volumes, or entire data centers. Each component (e.g. at the web layer, application layer, data layer) needs to be considered independently, and designed with the realities of data center infrastructure and Internet bandwidth, cost and performance in mind. Solutions for resilient design are almost as many and varied as are the software components they utilize. For example, databases alone comprise a wide range of approaches and resiliency characteristics, including SQL, NoSQL, replication, caching technologies, etc.

But the secret sauce really comes in how your architecture is operated. What parts of the system can respond automatically to failure, what parts can respond nearly automatically, and which not at all? To be more specific, if a given cloud resource goes down — be it a disk drive, a server, a network switch, a SAN, or an entire geographical region — how seamlessly can you launch or fail over to another and keep operations running? Ideally, of course, the more that;s automated (or nearly so), the better your operational excellence.

Achieving that level of automation requires your system design and configuration be easily replicable. Servers, for example, need to be quickly re-deployable in a predictable fashion across different cloud infrastructures. It’s this automation that gives organizations the life-saving flexibility they need when crisis strikes. Our own RightScale ServerTemplate methodology, as an example, provides this re-deployment capability that allows a server, if brought down from an outage, to be launched in another cloud in a matter of minutes.

Customizable Best Practices in the Cloud

The right cloud management solution should simplify the process of launching entire deployments through customizable best practices. It should also provide complete visibility into all infrastructures through a central management dashboard – a ‘single pane of glass’ – through which administrators can monitor performance and make capacity changes based on real-time needs. The same automation and control that gives organizations the ability to scale up or down using multiple servers when demand increases also allows them to migrate entire server deployments to a new infrastructure when disaster strikes.

The fallout from the Japanese earthquake and Amazon outage is being felt throughout the business community and is causing organizations to rethink how they ensure business continuity. Cloud architecture provides the distributed structures necessary to counteract regional disasters, but companies also need the cloud management capabilities necessary to fail over their operations to multiple infrastructures in a way that keeps things up and running.

Some may have thought the cloud was a magic bullet. It’s not, and that’s actually good news. By recognizing one of the original founding principles of cloud architectures — that everything fails at some point — businesses are now in a position to design and build services that are more resilient than in the past, at a fraction of the cost. With the right architecture and management layer, cloud-based services can provide unparalleled disaster protection and business continuity.

Michael Crandell is CEO of RightScale, the leader in cloud computing management.

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We’ve seen a trifecta of failures and/or screwups over the past couple of weeks, from three of the world’s technology giants: Apple was shown to be keeping a log of the location of millions of iPhone users, Sony’s PlayStation platform was hacked and millions of customer accounts were compromised, and Amazon’s (a amzn) cloud-hosting service EC2 went down for hundreds of companies. The reasons for these screwups were different, but the reaction from the companies involved was remarkably similar: a conspicuous lack of timely response. Like many others, these tech giants don’t seem to have realized that crisis response is real-time now too.

Apple, of course, is notoriously close-mouthed about this kind of thing, as was seen in the “Antennagate” affair last year, when Apple stonewalled on the issue of its new iPhone 4 antennas and flaws in the unit’s design. And the initial response from Apple co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs in that case was also classic: he reportedly said “Don’t hold it that way.” In this case, there was virtually no response from the company whatsoever to the location-data issue for days, until — again, in classic Jobs style — a statement was made to a single news outlet effectively saying the issue was overblown and/or the result of a few bugs, and that everyone should just calm down (my colleague Bobbie Johnson disagrees). Oh, and a response took so long because it’s really complicated stuff.

Given its past behavior, it’s possible that Apple is beyond help in this area. The company’s approach seems to be that people will unfailingly line up to buy its products regardless of how it handles such PR gaffes, so it may be a lost cause. But Amazon and Sony arguably have a lot more to lose.

Sony in particular — a former technology leader — has not been doing well on a number of fronts for years now, as Apple has taken over virtually every market segment that the technology company used to own. Not only that, but the company is already infamous in computer security circles for its last major fiasco in 2005, the “Sony rootkit” affair, in which users had a virus-like software program installed on their computers without their knowledge if they played a CD. So you might think that the company would try hard to get out in front of the most recent issue — which venture investor and technology analyst Paul Kedrosky described as “among the worst such debacles in modern financial/technical history” — as quickly as possible. Oh, but it’s really complicated too.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos

Amazon is not nearly as desperate as Sony, but the company has still pinned a lot of its hopes for the future on the success of its cloud-hosting and cloud-based services business, and seeing hundreds of major companies and websites fail — and lose critical data — is a huge issue. And yet, while Amazon eventually did release something that was much closer to an actual apology than anything Sony or Apple came out with, the company still avoided discussing the issue for what seemed like an eternity in Internet time. One Internet analyst said that Amazon’s “anemic public response” was a major flaw, and that arguably wasn’t the only one.

This isn’t an issue just for Apple, Sony and Amazon — it’s something that companies of all kinds are still struggling to deal with. The reality is that social media such as Twitter and Facebook have increased the ability of customers and users to speak out about such issues, and decreased the amount of time that companies have to deal with them. And that means the old approach of taking days to hold “war room” meetings and come up with elaborate PR plans just doesn’t work any more.

Those things still have to be done, but they have to be done a lot faster, and while they are being done someone has to respond, even just to say “We are sorry, we are looking into the problem” (and if you don’t know when to respond, try this flowchart the U.S. Army came up with for responding to blogs). You don’t just get to reap the benefits of real-time when you are a technology company: you also get to see the other side of that double-edged sword when you screw up. And it cuts just as deep.

Thumbnail photo courtesy of Flickr user Hans Gerwitz

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Entrepreneur and startup advisor Eric Ries yesterday wrote an impassioned blog post at Startup Lessons Learned asking startups and other companies to “stop lying on stage” about their accomplishments, and to be more honest about their failures. Among other things, he mentioned a blog post last week from Wesabe co-founder Marc Hedlund that went into detail about why the company failed and its competitor (Mint) succeeded. Now Ries’s plea has sparked another failure post-mortem, from Standout Jobs co-founder Ben Yoskovitz, who wrote a post today about his company’s shortcomings.

Yoskovitz, who has since become the co-founder of a Montreal-based seed fund/incubator known as Year One Labs, sold the job-related startup he founded with investor and entrepreneur Austin Hill in May for an undisclosed price, but makes it clear in his post that the company more or less failed to achieve what he had hoped to achieve. Why? The founder names several factors, including:

• Bad timing. “Our timing was terrible. We launched the paying version of our application in the fall of 2008 about 5 minutes before the economy collapsed.”
• Not fast enough. “I had an exceptionally strong team… but in reality we didn’t code and launch fast enough. We didn’t get product into customers’ hands fast enough.”
• Too much money. “Raising the money felt like winning. It felt like all (or most of) the justification we needed. It set us on a path of building a bigger product than we should have, and committing (falsely) to our own assumptions of what would work, without fully testing them.”

Yoskovitz also mentions that he didn’t make it easy enough for users to do what they wanted to do with the site, in part because Standout Jobs was trying to change user behavior in ways that the company thought would be better. The reality is that most users don’t like to change, and Standout Jobs didn’t manage to convince them otherwise. Marc Hedlund mentions a similar point in his post-mortem: Despite being first to market, and being revenue-positive, Hedlund says Wesabe failed because it simply made things too difficult and complicated for users, while its competitor Mint made them very simple, and simple almost always wins.

Another point the Standout Jobs founder mentions is that he didn’t have a strong enough understanding of the market he was attacking before he launched the service. “I see countless entrepreneurs make the same mistake,” he says. “They look at a market objectively and think, “I can fix that!” only to realize when they get neck-deep into it that there are a whole bunch of issues they didn’t understand.” As it turns out, this is almost the exact same advice given by Paul Biggar in another recent startup post-mortem — a post about the failure of NewsTilt earlier this year — when he admits that he didn’t really know much about the market he was trying to fix.

Final word goes to Marc Hedlund:

You’ll hear a lot about why company A won and company B lost in any market, and in my experience, a lot of the theories thrown about — even or especially by the participants — are utter crap. A domain name doesn’t win you a market; launching second or fifth or tenth doesn’t lose you a market. You can’t blame your competitors or your board or the lack of or excess of investment. Focus on what really matters: making users happy with your product as quickly as you can, and helping them as much as you can after that.

If you want to explore some more examples of the startup post-mortem oeuvre, ChubbyBrain has put together a list (hat tip to Paul Kedrosky for pointing that one out) that includes an analysis from investor Roger Ehrenberg about why one of his startups failed, as well as founder Scott Rafer’s post-mortem on the failure of Lookery (which he blames in large part on an over-dependence on Facebook). In a nice touch, Chubby Brain has even included its own failure post-mortem as part of the list.

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Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Alex Proimos

I call these items a “moving to-do list,” and I’m always on the lookout for them. They’re those things that follow me around for weeks or months on end, until I finally own up to it and say, “I’m never going to get to that. I might as well quit moving it forward.”

I’m not talking about those pesky to-dos that eventually really do have to get done. I have a couple of them on my list right now, things like fixing a mirror on my vanity or the trip lever on my bathtub. Eventually, if I keep ignoring those to-dos and moving them forward on my list instead of just doing them, the mirror on my antique vanity will break, and my bathtub won’t drain (not good). Hopefully, I’ll get to those things before that happens, but the point is, eventually, as annoying as they might be, we get to these kinds of things, because if we don’t, there are consequences.

What I’m talking about are those things that might not have obvious consequences if we fail to do them, or that have consequences we’re subconsciously willing to pay. These are things like:

• Writing that book we’ve been meaning to write, or
• Launching that new product or service. or
• Making changes to our service offerings or websites so that we stop taking on certain types of clients.

These are those tasks that we’re avoiding for some reason, and we need to figure out why. A few of the possible reasons?

1. Obligation. We keep saying to the people around us (business and accountability partners, customers and clients, family and friends) that we’re going to write that book. We say that it’s something we really want to do, or we say that it will bring in additional revenue for our businesses, but it turns out that we’re not really all that motivated to do it, yet we keep moving the task forward, because we’ve promised that that’s what we’re going to do.
2. Guilt. We think it’s something we should do, maybe because everyone else manages to get it done or because it’s our “responsibility” to do it, but internally, we’re doing it for all the wrong reasons and don’t really want to do it, and we feel guilty because of that, so we just keep moving forward and saying that we’re going to get it done.
3. Motivation (or lack of it). A lot of the tasks we take on are driven by financial motivations. Maybe we want to (or think we should) make more money, but in reality, we’re quite comfortable where we are, so even though we might think or say that we want to achieve greater financial success, the financial motivation alone is never going to be enough to make us do the task, but we keep moving it forward, because we think we should want more money.

At the end of the day, it comes down to acceptance. Acceptance of what we really want, of our own definition of success, and of who we really are (and who we’re not).

Once you accept all those things and are OK, saying, “You know what, I just don’t even really want that. It’s not who I am, it’s not what I want, and it’s not important for me to be happy,” give it up. Take it off the list and file it away as a “someday/maybe,” if you think it will ever come back on the radar or if you need that little bit of security, just in case you change your mind.

The bottom line is that a moving to-do list adds unnecessary stress and frustration and a feeling of failure, when really you’re just attempting to achieve something that you don’t even want or that’s some arbitrary achievement that won’t even matter to you if you do accomplish it. Let it go, and be OK with it. Free up that mind space for something that you actually do want and that you stand a chance of accomplishing, because you won’t get in your own way.

What needs to be taken off your moving to-do list?

Photo by Flickr user bark, licensed under CC 2.0

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NewsTilt, a Y Combinator-funded media startup that launched in April to much fanfare, shut down just two months later. How did things go off the rails so quickly? Co-founder Paul Biggar has written a long and thoughtful blog post about how and why the venture collapsed, and there are some useful lessons in it — not just for anyone thinking about a journalism-related web startup, but for startups of all kinds. It quickly becomes clear that virtually everything about NewsTilt was either wrong from the beginning or quickly went wrong, including Biggar’s relationship with his co-founder, and the company’s relationship with its customers or users:

Following the launch, everything started going to s***, and a huge number of challenges to the success of the company had arisen. The biggest of these were the lack of traction from launch, that we had lost the faith of our journalists, and because there were communication issues between Nathan (my co-founder) and I. This combination also killed our motivation. As a result, I made a carefully thought out decision to shut down the company, and return as much money as we had left (about 40%) to the investors.

One of the more glaringly obvious flaws in the company’s makeup is what appears to be a lack of interest in the problem NewsTilt was trying to solve. While the company had an idea of what it wanted to do for journalists — namely, to provide a platform for them to find an audience and theoretically build some kind of business around their content, similar to what True/Slant tried to do before being acquired by Forbes — neither of the founders had any background in journalism. Worse than that, Biggar admits that neither had much passion for the idea either; the startup evolved out of a plan to develop a better commenting system for newspapers.

The NewsTilt co-founder describes plenty of other problems: he and his co-founder didn’t communicate well, they didn’t have enough funding to develop many of the features they had promised to the journalists they signed up, they pitched the company the wrong way to users, they made some bad hires, and so on. But for me, the lack of passion for the problem is the biggest red flag in Biggar’s post-mortem. If the founders of a startup aren’t passionate about what they are doing — so much so that it keeps them up all hours of the day thinking about it — then success seems unlikely, if not impossible. According to his co-founder, Biggar was on his honeymoon for most of the month of May.

NewsTilt’s founders seem to have taken on the challenge of helping journalists find an online audience because they thought it was technically interesting, or because there was a potential market for it. But as David Cohn — who has built his own journalism-related startup called Spot.us — noted when NewsTilt’s closure was first reported earlier this year, technology won’t necessarily solve what is essentially a social problem in the media industry. As he puts it: “I think… the folks at NewsTilt put too much emphasis on their tech-wizardry and the idea that they would build tools for journalist and all of a sudden POOF – journalism would be solved.”

Unfortunately, as Cohn points out, there is no magic bullet that will suddenly save the media industry, or transform ordinary journalists into independent-thinking online media businesses. And as NewsTilt discovered, there is also no amount of funding or technical wizardry that can replace a passion for the problem you are trying to solve. The most positive thing to come from Biggar’s analysis is that at least he failed quickly.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d): What We Can Learn From the Guardian’s Open Platform

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Alex Proimos

There has been an ocean’s worth of schadenfreude spilled over Google’s decision to kill Wave, its experimental real-time collaboration tool. The reasons: It never had a purpose, it was too over-engineered in typical Googley fashion, it was a collection of features in search of a need, and so on. But shouldn’t we be celebrating the fact that Google was willing to experiment at all? That’s Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s view — he told reporters at the Techonomy conference that “we celebrate our failures,” saying the company encourages staff to take risks and possibly fail. And he is right to do so.

Yes, Wave was a hodgepodge of geeky features (hey look — I can see you typing while I’m typing!) without any real compelling use case. But the idea that people might want to collaborate in new ways isn’t a crazy one, and the concept of blending wiki-type features with instant messaging and document management isn’t really all that far-fetched either. It’s possible that Wave was just a little too early, and that most people haven’t even gotten used to the idea of Google Docs, let alone an all-in-one Swiss Army knife version. That doesn’t mean it was a stupid idea.

In any case, the impulse to experiment with such things and then release those features and services into the wild is arguably one of the best things about Google — such as the 20-percent projects that occasionally become Gmail or Google News or one of the company’s other big success stories. John Gruber of the Apple blog Daring Fireball writes that he is surprised Wave was even shipped, and that no other company would ever have released it. That may be true — and Apple certainly wouldn’t have, since its focus on hyper-designing everything borders on the pathological.

But that said, isn’t one of the positive things about web companies that they can experiment with things, and “fail quickly and fail often?” Isn’t that what so many startup advisors keep telling companies they should be prepared to do if they want to succeed? It’s kind of refreshing that a company the size of Google is still tossing experiments out into the world to see what happens to them and then try to learn from that. There aren’t many other large companies that are willing to do that.

So maybe Wave was poorly designed, or over-engineered, and didn’t deserve to live. But we shouldn’t be so quick to condemn Google for releasing it or experimenting with it — if anything, we should be cheering them on. Here’s a video of Eric Schmidt talking about Wave and other topics such as net neutrality at the Techonomy conference:

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Iwan Wolkow

Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up. — Thomas Edison

There comes a point when being a business owner gets really hard (and I mean really hard). You’ve come up with your big idea, you’ve done all the initial legwork to set it up, and now comes the hard part: Getting the word out about your business and, more importantly, hanging in there while you get the word out about your business. The hard part now becomes not giving up too soon.

The Real Work

When you start a business, when you start a new product or service, when you launch anything really, that’s when you feel like you’re working really hard. That’s when you’re willing to stay up late and get up early to get all the groundwork completed so that you can start making money. As hard as it can seem during this time, you generally know what to do, or you can at least figure out what to do, and you just plow through getting the work done. Then you finish the work. (Cue sound of crickets.) Now what?

All right, now you figure out that you need a marketing plan. Great, that gives you something else to do! You finish the marketing plan and begin implementing it. (You believe in this plan. You’ve given it a lot of thought. You feel really confident about it. It’s going to generate the business you need.) You run through your plan for several days, maybe even several weeks, and then … nothing. Nothing happens, and in our instant-gratification-seeking world, this is where things start getting testy:

• When you’re over the rush of your big idea,
• When you’ve completed the work of creating it,
• When you need to pay the bills, and
• When it feels like you’re sitting on your laurels.

When you’re doing all that initial setup (building your website, creating the product, etc.), it feels like real work. Marketing doesn’t feel like real work, and it gets harder to justify and explain to those around us, particularly those who don’t have businesses. Marketing? What’s marketing? Building a website people get; that sounds like real work. Marketing? Marketing on Facebook and Twitter? All right, now you’re just playing around. Those are the conversations you have, both with yourself and with others, for justifying what you’re doing.

Writing posts for your blog, replying and posting on social networks, doing interviews, commenting on other sites and forums, searching for opportunities to guest post — all these things don’t feel like work, but they’re very necessary for building a successful business, and sticking with these activities for the bulk of your time each day for the six months or year it’s going to take you to gain some traction seems impossible.

Not Giving Up

So, how do you do it? How do you avoid giving up too soon?

1. You make a commitment. Do you want to do this? Are you willing to bet the next 6-12 months of your life on it? You have to be willing to say, “This is my commitment. These are the milestones I intend to reach. This is my intention.”
2. You maintain discipline. Each and every day, you have to say, “This is what I’m committed to doing. These are my top priorities.” You have to focus on what you believe to be the “highest and best use” tasks that will get the word out about your business and start generating income for you. You stay focused, not only on what you’re going to do, but also on what you’re not going to do (compulsively checking email, surfing the Internet, taking a dozen breaks each day, etc.).
3. You trust your plan. You’ve given a lot of thought to the best way for promoting your business, and now you just have to believe in it. Don’t keep switching plans and changing things up. It’s going to take time to see results. Give yourself at least a 90-day test with your current plan before doing any tweaking.
4. Be willing to stay up late and get up early. Although it’s not easy to think about, success isn’t just going to be handed to you. You’re going to have to roll up your sleeves and do the hard work to get things going. No one’s going to do it for you. As you start to get more successful, you still have to continue getting the word out, and juggling priorities can be a challenge. Know that handling incoming work and generating opportunities for future work are equally important.
5. Find support. Get an accountability partner to help you stay the course. It’s a lot easier to waiver when you don’t have someone else holding you responsible and accountable for your original plans and intentions.

Finding a way to hang in there and not give up on your vision can be the hardest thing you ever do to see your business to success, but you have to figure out how you’re going to stick with it for the time it will take to gain some momentum and start seeing results.

In the past, how did you find ways to hang in there until your idea took hold?

Photo by Flickr user ground.zero, licensed under CC 2.0

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