Loadingā¦
5
A Calgary founder told me he keeps a 'tried and failed' list taped to his fridge and it hit me hard
I was at a small meetup in Calgary last Thursday, maybe 30 people in a rented room above a coffee place on 17th Ave, and this guy who runs a seed stage SaaS startup got up to talk. He said something I keep thinking about: he keeps a list on his fridge of every idea or feature his team tried and killed, with the reason next to it. He said it's up to 41 entries now and that reading it before a planning meeting stops his team from pitching the same stuff twice. What got me was that he doesn't call it a graveyard, he calls it a map. I run a two person startup out of my apartment in Edmonton and I have never once written down why something didn't work, I just move on and forget. So this week I started my own list and I'm already at 6 items, including the cold email thing we spent 3 weeks on that got zero replies. It feels dumb and small but it's already saved me from re pitching something my cofounder shot down in March. Do any of you keep something like this, or does it just turn into a list you never read again?
1 comments
Log in to join the discussion
Log In1 Comment
wren30720d ago
Who actually has time to read a list on their fridge though? I get the idea but for me the real win is just writing the reason down somewhere you'll trip over it later. Like I use a running note on my phone titled "never again" and it's mostly dumb stuff like "the Tuesday night twitter space, 4 listeners, never again" or "that one landing page test where we changed the button color and got 3 more clicks, not worth 2 weeks." The fridge thing sounds cute but are you really walking to your kitchen before every meeting? Mine lives in my pocket so I actually see it. Six items in a week is a good start though, keep going and it turns into real ammo when someone re pitches the cold email thing in June.
3