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Conclusions from my 1st year of podcasting This episode is the last and final part of my 1st year anniversary special events. The issue of entrepreneurial and startups success rate seems to be a major issue. There isn’t a question about the high chances of failure. Did you ever ask yourself why? 20 years ago, establishing a startup involved trying new and unfamiliar technologies, which had quite a high chance of failing. But today, most of the startups are about new habits or better ways to organize traditional processes. Most of the technology is mature, and it seems like there shouldn’t be such a high percentage of failing startups and entrepreneurial businesses. Analysts say, at any given moment, 70 people around the world are trying to develop a solution to any specific problem. I can assure you that the one who wins the market won’t be the one with the best technology. Most of them would probably be sufficient. Technologies aren’t a barrier anymore. The one that will win the market will be the one that manages to drive the most people to use and buy their solution; this is called marketing. As I define it, marketing is about looking at things from the point of view of your potential users, because the money we are looking for is in their pockets. I started this podcast as part of my mission over the last ten years – to increase the chances for entrepreneurial business success. As hard as I looked, there weren’t enough professional analysis of entrepreneurs’ success rates. This podcast, where I interview successful entrepreneurs weekly, was born in order to help entrepreneurs succeed by learning from other entrepreneurs and finding the patterns that work best. What are these successful patterns that my interviewees talked about? It starts with understanding your audience. It’s almost impossible to count the number of times interviewees spoke of the need to really talk with your audience, and to avoid doing things you think, and instead start doing things your audience needs or wants. Three of the best-known and most successful entrepreneurs, Michael Stelzner, Chris Brogan, and John Lee Dumas used this exact issue as an example of their failures. By the way, each of them tried it after their first big success. Michael Stelzner, the founder and CEO of the most successful social media blog and conference tried to adopt something that worked in the world of social media to a totally different field: I was already very successful, and in my mind I thought well, I will take what I’ve done here and I’ll try it in a new space. And I assumed I would be successful, because I’d done it before. I started a project, called My Kid’s Adventures.com and my goal was to create something for parents of young children who were looking to help them do things in a non-digital way… anything that was not a computer screen. And it didn’t work! I spent an enormous amount of money on it, it was a huge failure, and this was while Social Media Examiner was exploding. The lesson that I learned from this is that we must stop something to start something. It wasn’t the right time for me to take this project on. I shut it down, but I learned a lot in the process. It was a great learning experience and humbling. John Lee Dumas wanted to offer a service of establishing a podcast like his most successful podcast for entrepreneurs to others that wanted a podcast of their own: This was a huge mistake that I made, and it was a big waste of time energy, effort, and money. It goes back to 2013. A lot of people said they love my podcast and would love to create their own. I wanted to create an entire platform in which I could create other people podcasts for them. I’d host their shows, I’d edit their podcast, I’d create their show notes; I’d do it all. I called it PodPlatform. Everybody that heard the idea said it’s a great product. I made all the arrangement and invested and only 1 person signed up for it. Luckily it...