It is important to fail atleast once in life.

Failure is as important as success. And the sooner you fail, the sooner you will learn. Failure is indeed a pillar of success for every startup.

Two years back I had an idea and I was desperate to get it started. Good that I didnot or rather could not start it. When I sit and think about those days, I say to myself, God, I didn’t know any thing then about starting up, yet thought I could conquer the world with my ideas. I do not know anything now also, but the difference is, I know I do not know any thing now.

My first website launch was World IT Day. It was built more or less around the concept of million dollar home page, with a purpose. I still like the idea and some good hearts have praised the idea as well. Needless to say, it bombed and then I had no clue why. This article actually summarizes everything I went thru and the reason why it bombed.

But still I would not say it as a complete failure. It taught me more than any book, article or blog could have taught me. I learnt so many things between then and now, that I consider myself a fool when I started the idea. The best way to learn is to try and fail. If you do not fail, you will succeed. But if you do not try, you will neither succeed nor learn.

The experience of my first startup has humbled me, has taught many important facts which can not be explained. I have gone thru the emotional ride and come out of it. I am more calm, composed and take every step with precise calculation. What is most important, I am ready to fail again but I am not going to stop trying.

If you are looking to startup, if you have an idea, my suggestion to you is go ahead and do it. You will either succeed or learn, but you will not lose anything. My success strategy is to keep trying.

What is the psychology of web users?

I am doing a research on the psychology of web users and how it has changed in the past few months.

I have started to believe that knowing the behaviour of the users is the first step to do any marketing. The behavioural pattern have changed a lot since the first time I started observing things.

The trend changes fast, very fast on the web and predicting the change is increasingly becoming difficult. Few years back, we saw the introduction and the growth of a style of marketing, called “Invites”. Gmail did it very well. Many social networking did it very well. But now what is the probablity of your joining a website/visiting a website if you are invited by your friend? The figure comes very close to zero.

However, we still get a lot of invites from new websites. If only they knew the change in the user behaviour. The best strategy of marketing will be to make the website open to all at the start, even having OpenID to log in. The users should be able to use your website, the moment they visit, without bothering about registeration, invites, etc.

We do not see this trend at its peak yet, but it might very soon become a certainity in all websites.

If you have read it this far, I have a three questions for you.

1. What is the single most important reason for you to open your web browser?

2. What compels you in visiting a news site, a social networking website, social media websites, etc?

3. What is your source of knowing about a new website, service or offer over the internet? Blogs? twitter? others?

Blog at WordPress.com.
Theme: Esquire by Matthew Buchanan.