The journey to becoming a successful entrepreneur is harder than I thought, and as most people on the more successful side in any field will tell you, failure is a huge part of the journey. Not failing deliberately, but you gotta try things to do things. Not everything is going to work, and developing a healthy relationship to the failures will improve your quality of life and make you last through the phases where everything seems to go to shit.
In retrospect all the dumb decisions you made are actually pretty funny. So: How about a fail conference?
Budding entrepreneurs can see that the road is rough, but can be traveled and they understand that these successful people they look up to are also just human. Many entrepreneurs are actually quite accessible and offer many insights to their path, such as podcasts, or blogs, but having a platform really focused on the things that went wrong could be an interesting addition.
Usually you only see the result, and not the process in any form of creation (a musician doesn’t practice on stage, a photography doesn’t show all of his shots). This is a huge misunderstanding – there is no such thing as overnight success (well there is, but it usually takes years 😉 ), and a conference showing the way would help understand this. People would learn they have to persevere, and one failure (or ten failures) does not make them a failure.
To start, it could be in a very informal atmosphere, have a fail dinner. Everybody has to share the dumbest businesses they started ( For me that would probably be my Heavy Metal Toothbrush), you drink wine and share good things, have a bunch of fun and maybe even learn a thing or two.
How do you earn money with this? Well, you could of course charge to take part and when it gets bigger, turn it into a conference, with tickets for sale. I’m fairly certain there is a crowd willing to visit these events (at least in cities populated with startups). If you do plan on having a dinner like that, please invite me.
This could also be a great lead-in to a coaching program. Help people fail better the next time.
It’s just an idea. Feel free to turn it into more.