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- 🤦🏽‍♂️ The Failed Launch
🤦🏽‍♂️ The Failed Launch
It will always cost more than you expected
Dyani Janga
February 04, 2025
You’ve definitely had this experience before: You go to the store to buy just a few groceries, but you leave with a full bag of things you never knew you needed.
That, my friend, is because you will always stumble across various things you didn’t know you needed.
And the funny thing is—it doesn’t only count for grocery shopping…
đź’µ It Will Always Cost More
When you get into business you will—just like with grocery shopping—find out about various extra costs you’d need to account for.
I’m not just speaking about monetary costs, but also time, energy, and skills.
Truth is, everything worth having will always cost more than expected.
No matter what it is, business, marriage, getting a house, going out to eat… You get it.
🔑 Key Take Away
Everything, especially the things worth having, will always cost more than expected
If it’s not hard to get, expensive, or scarce—will people even value it?
Having six-pack abs is something valuable because it takes hard and consistent work to get. Think about it; you need to watch your food intake, go to the gym and train abs (training abs sucks 🤮), and do this for a long time to get the result.
Same thing goes for money: Most people don’t have any. So they value it.
Also relationships: If you’re with a stunning woman that makes you do and feel like no-one has ever before, you’d want to stay with her.
Moral of the story: If you want to have something, it will always cost more time, energy, money, and work than expected to get it, and that’s okay.
🤦🏽‍♂️ The Failed Launch
I remember launching my first business when I had nothing. No money and 0 skills to make it work
I sketched out my business plan, wasted hours of my life figuring out how to buy a domain and create a professional email for it, and off I went… scraping Google Maps for any potential business that could use my services.
Here’s the catch: No one could use my services.
Naïve little me thought it was a smart idea to offer document translation services to businesses because I’ve heard about it on a YouTube video.
Obviously it’s a useless idea—Google literally has built-in features for translation.
After days of waking up at 5 AM and sending cold emails without any replies, I understood it. It was a terrible business idea.
But then came the unexpected costs.
To succeed in business, It costed the skills I didn’t have yet.
So I needed to acquire them.
Especially in the beginning stages of business, you’ll find out you need more skills than you thought.
The reason a seasoned entrepreneur can start a new business and succeed right away is not because of a difference in money or time… it’s because experience and skill.
When you start, you’ll fall and fall.
But you need to get up so you can learn how to run a business.
đź‘ž Action Step
Identify the gaps in your knowledge and work on filling them. Whether it’s sales, marketing, or technical skills, invest in learning before expecting success.
đź“– Book Bit
Success is not delivering a feature; success is learning how to solve the customer’s problem.
The Lean Startup - Eric Ries
Just like how I realised my translation service wasn’t actually needed, businesses must validate their ideas before investing too much time and effort.
The real cost of success isn’t just money; it’s the time and skills needed to adapt and pivot.
I couldn’t adapt or pivot, so I failed.
Now I’m capable of making things work because I’ve acquired the right skills and know what to do—and how to do it!
🌟 Epiphany
The real cost of success isn’t just money—it’s the hidden price of time, skills, and resilience. If you’re not willing to pay that price, you’re not ready to own the reward.
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