Taking risks is what every entrepreneur does in the hope that a maverick idea pays off. But sometimes those bets fail spectacularly, unleashing a torrent of “I told you so’s.”
DON’T GO TOO BIG TOO SOON
It didn’t take long for Wonder, a children’s retail megastore to prove too big for its breaches. Launched by Shane Christensen who was the head of a well established investor group with money to spend. Wonder aimed to become a destination store for all things kid related.
Christensen had planned to open 19 more locations around the country within five years. But less than four months after opening its flagship store in 2011, the company couldn’t pay the bills to stock the massive 135,000 square foot space and had to close the doors.
Big ambitions are admirable. But going so big right out of the gate was a mistake. You could look at this business and see they were going to go off a cliff before they even launched.
KNOW WHO YOU’RE WORKING WITH
Outbox, a company that attempted to bring snail mail into the digital age, was courageous and well funded. The idea was to manage people’s physical mailboxes by unsubscribing them from junk mail, and scanning their letters and bills to convert them to email correspondence.
Too bad that they overlooked the fact that the Postal Service had no interest in technology that would reduce the volume of mail going to people’s homes. In fact the Postmaster General shut down the operation in 2012, reportedly for the reason that the real customer of the Postal Service isn’t the citizen’s but rather the hundreds of volume mailers who expert their junk mail to end up in the millions of homes.
LEARN YOUR LESSON
Not once, but twice HourlyNerd, who are an online marketplace that provides businesses with consulting support, attempted to play the labour arbitrage game by turning to cheap overseas web developers to build their website. And not once but twice, they found themselves with a horrible end product and very little cash left to undo the damage.
Fortunately, their story doesn’t end with those near fatal missteps. HourlyNerd forged ahead, and became evangelists for spending money on the best developers and technology a startup can afford from day one.
The Evolve Team
