Oh, wow. It’s interesting because I feel like especially working at startups, right, that’s the nature of it. There’s going to be failures, you’re going to try it. like if you’re not trying things and potentially failing. I won’t go through the litany of like, here are the number of campaigns that I’ve done over my career.
But I do think it’s interesting. I would say at one of the smaller startups that I was at, I joined when it was like 30 people, and we went to about 100 people. And I think as part of that, for me, we went through a massive point where we had really—we were building these incredible products and we were working on like, okay, do we really have that product market fit and bringing it to market? And we kept struggling with that.
And so the company actually was starting to really struggle. And so there were some massive setbacks in that time where it was like and again, it’s the type of place where the marketing budget was zero. So I’m running marketing in that situation.
And I think there was a large deal that the company was really depending on. And when that deal fell through, there was this moment of like, “Oh wow, what do we do?” And I think it’s like in those moments where you have that understanding of like, okay, how did we get to this point? And so seeing a setback like that, it was really understanding, you know, even as a startup, you can’t be dependent, you can’t be relying on one other company to determine your fate, right?
And so I think that was part of what I learned from that was like, you should never put yourself in a situation, whether it’s a smaller startup, a bigger company, where one other entity is going to determine the fate of whatever you’re doing.
And so I think just being able to take those moments where sometimes, again, there’ll be small setbacks along the way that you…For all of our campaigns that we do, we always have what we call an after party because a little more positive post mortem, where we sit together and really understand what worked, what didn’t work and we really learn from. And especially when things don’t work, we really are like, “Okay, well, what can we learn and do better?” But I think even when you have those really large moments, it’s like, what are we really learning from this moment? And how do we take what we’ve just experienced?
And again, going back to: Were we asking the right question upfront? Were we trying to solve the right thing from the beginning? And then how does this actually change, you know, your view on the world?
