How you can learn from your failures

This article is written by Nardine B. M’barek, a Contributor Author at Startup Istanbul.

Aurore Belfrage is a tech entrepreneur, investor, and a partner at EQT Ventures with a specific focus on Artificial Intelligence and GovTech. She is a syndicated columnist with leading Swedish daily Svenska Dagbladet (SVD) and a contributor to POLITICO. She writes on issues at the intersection of geopolitics, ethics, governance, labor and future of work. Belfrage was born in London, and holds an MA in Entrepreneurship and an MSc in Business and Administration from the Stockholm School of Economics.

 The important aspect when being an entrepreneur is your mindset. If you start working on a business while you are convinced that nothing is going to work as you want it to, then you will achieve nothing. Everything lies within the way you think, you need to convince yourself that you are an entrepreneur and that you can achieve your dreams like everyone did. You do not lack anything, you are creative and innovative and have everything that other entrepreneurs have, the only thing that you might lack is the necessary self-confidence for you to attain your goals. 

Mrs. Belfarge talked about the importance of the mindset when someone plans on becoming an entrepreneur, it is so crucial to think of one’s self as being a person who can develop her or his own ideas, and turn it into a successful business for her or him to actually do it. If that if not the case with you, then you will forever be stuck between wanting to launch your company and showing to the world how your product or idea could bring real change and the fact that you can not bring yourself to bring your idea out of your mind and show it to everyone.

If you keep being afraid and scared of failure and start questioning your strategies and beliefs, then you will not learn from your failures, you will rather not learn anything at all. Mrs. Belfarge talked about the failure that the WRAPP team went through when they first launched their business; they were so confident that they had a good plan that was going to absolutely work. However, they made the wrong decisions, they changed the strategy that they took so long to develop based on what other businesses in the same field did. They opened up to eight other markets and did the US on parallel. On paper, it sounded very brilliant, however, in reality, it made them lose focus especially on their product. 

The main idea about marketing and doing business is that you need to sell the problem that you solving rather than the product that you created. In other words, what are you gifting to the world, and what kind of services are you offering that suggest a tremendous change to people who are potential clients. Of course, when you offer a business, you need to set up a price, do not forget that it makes a huge part of your business. 

The WRAPP team had created something new an,d revolutionary, and they were very proud that they were innovating and experimental. Then, they sold it to traditional businesses such as NIKE. The thing is that they were asking teams who did not know each other to cooperate. They were rather proud of the way they revolutionized the way they work, so it took forever for them to push their product in because they were arrogant about how they were structured. You need to think about your clients and prepare everything before offering your services to them. 

https://vimeo.com/141908422