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23rd Episode’s Show Notes John Lee Dumas, Chris Brogan, Joe Pulizzi & more share their biggest entrepreneurial failures with customers, and they’re all talking about the same mistake: “Going with what I thought is the biggest problem, instead of listening to customers”. Hello, Reach or Miss listeners. It’s has become almost traditional to have a special episode every now and then focusing on a major issue that was mentioned a lot on the show and has an impact on many entrepreneurs. Last time I chose to speak about the best advice our interviewees shared with us. Today, I would like to talk about failures with customers. During the interviews, I ask every guest to share their biggest most significant failure with customers, the one that affected their journey the most. There is one thing that popped up in most of the interviews and that is the role of that big failure leading to huge remarkable success.   I’ve chosen 5 successful guests whose failure stories are the most inspiring and helpful to you, our listeners. The biggest failures with customer The first failure story is the story of Joe Pulizzi. Being one of the first to recognize the coming change and the power of content marketing, Joe was trying to develop the first Matching Machine.   Joe Pulizzi Joe Pulizzi is founder of Content Marketing Institute, a UBM company, the leading education and training organization for content marketing, which includes the largest in-person content marketing event in the world, Content Marketing World. Joe is the winner of the 2014 John Caldwell Lifetime Achievement Award from the Content Council.  Joe is the author of four books, including his latest, Content Inc.  His third book, Epic Content Marketing was named one of “Five Must Read Business Books of 2013” by Fortune Magazine. You can find Joe on Twitter @JoePulizzi. If you ever see Joe in person, he’ll be wearing orange.   Joe’s biggest failure with customers There has been so many…. The most crystal clear failure was when I first started as entrepreneur. I had the most amazing idea in the world; it was a matching service for marketers. We developed an online matching system and we would match you to agencies or freelance writers to help you with your content. We focused on that so much, and I fell so in love with the product but we were bleeding cash, and then I saw all the feedback from our marketing readership that asked us for mentoring, training, templates, and so many products and services… So, we did our pivot and built that audience, and then we started monetize that, and we launched Content Marketing World and the podcast and grew from hundred thousand dollars to more than 10 million dollars in a few years.   Douglas Burdett Douglas Burdett is founder and principal of ARTILLERY, a business-to-business marketing agency in Norfolk, Virginia, and is the host of The Marketing Book Podcast, which was named by LinkedIn as one of “10 Podcasts That Will Make You a Better Marketer.” Prior to starting his own firm, Douglas worked in New York City on Madison Avenue for 10 years at ad industry giants J. Walter Thompson and Grey Advertising. Before starting his business career, Douglas served as a U.S. Army artillery officer in Germany for three years and then earned an MBA.   Douglas’s biggest failure with a customer Five years ago, when I started my own company, I was very focused on advertising. I hire Michael Gass, a consultant that was blogging about ad agencies and new business, and he helped ad agencies look for the niche they would like to focus on and write a specific blog to that niche, separate from their agency’s web site. Michael asked me, ‘what do you think you would like to write about?’ And I wasn’t sure because until then I was doing everything; from Listerine mouthwash to Panasonic, hospitals, banks, and more, But I was fascinated by the military, I served in the US army, and there...