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“My reputation grows with every failure.” -George Bernard Shaw

This past week, we here at the Unreasonable Institute experienced our first full-fledged and very public failure as an organization. We launched our Finalist Marketplace, the online platform where the first 25 of our 35 finalists to raise the $6,500 are selected to attend the Unreasonable Institute. Unfortunately, the launch of the marketplace on January 25 was accompanied by a number of serious technical glitches that lost both the Unreasonable Institute and our finalists a good deal of credibility with online visitors. The experience has been emotionally difficult as we received a flood of emails from frustrated sponsors and finalists (rightfully so), but also a very educational and inspiring one. This blog post is a summary of the most important things we’ve learned from the experience.

Fail Fast. You may have read VC Jim Estill’s post “Fail Fast, Fail Often, Fail Cheap” which explains we ought to encourage risk-taking and failure in organizations to promote innovation. We have certainly taken the post to heart at the Unreasonable Institute, perhaps pushing toward achieving goals that were realistically out of our reach and the particular talents of our team. Without tremendous familiarity with the kind of website programming it would require to build it, we set out to design an online marketplace in a few months for a couple thousand dollars, and about 65% of it went right. Comparing the platform to similar online marketplaces, it should have cost about $200,000, taken years to build, and functioned perfectly (especially when people are contributing funds to support entrepreneurs). But, as Don Dodge writes in his recent post about how Google sets goals, “achieving 65% of the impossible is better than 100% of the ordinary.” Once this platform functions, it could enable entrepreneurs from every walk of life and every corner of the globe to securely raise the funds the need to attend the Unreasonable Institute at no cost to themselves, while garnering hundreds of supporters around the world. It could be expanded to a social investment marketplace to provide these entrepreneurs access to capital even after the Unreasonable Institute and be used by many organizations on an international scale to crowdfund promising, high-impact social ventures. We’re en route to realizing this vision, learning, as Thomas Edison said, the many ways that don’t work on our way to discovering what does work.

Admit it Fast. In the meanwhile, there’s no denying the negative consequences of our ambition. We dramatically failed to deliver what we promised in front of at least 8,000 people (who’d set up sponsor accounts on our Finalist Marketplace). Some of the problems with our marketplace, largely due to unexpectedly high traffic and holes in backend programming, included the fact that sponsors were making pledges to entrepreneurs on the marketplace that just flat out did not show up. Sponsors were also able to (though we were supposed to ensure that they could not) make multiple donations to the same entrepreneur. Many visitors reported to us that the online marketplace was difficult to navigate and that the user-experience was confusing and frustrating. There’s no excuse: we simply can’t put out a marketplace riddled with this many issues when 35 incredible entrepreneurs have rallied hundreds, even thousands, of their supporters around the globe to support them via this platform in good faith. Our team has never hit such a low.

But as Robert Frost reminds us, “The best way out is always through.” So we sent an email to every single user explaining the situation and the fact that it was completely our own misjudgments that this online marketplace that was far less than perfect. The reaction was truly surprising: people were understanding. One sponsor who had expressed frustration with our marketplace in the past told us our admission of failure restored her faith in our organization. Others offered words of encouragement through a difficult time. One of our finalists even sent us Rudyard Kipling’s poem “If” to help give us some perspective (I highly recommend you read it right now). We were amazed to see the same group of people we had frustrated profoundly respond to our open admission of failure with support and encouragement. We, learned, therefore, that openly admitting failure or weakness, as on a personal level, can show the human side of an organization and thus improve its relationship with the public. So long as you make it right as soon as possible.

Fix It Fast. While the support of the finalists and sponsors on the site has been incredibly inspiring and helpful, if we fail to produce a function marketplace again, we will lose credibility with them permanently. So we’ve taken specific steps to solicit and respond to all the feedback we’ve received (especially from our customers: the 35 entrepreneurs who are our finalists). We’ve acquired a new PHP programmer who’s tightening up the backend of the marketplace. We’ve integrated Amazon Payment Systems for secure and verified payments. We’ve adjusted the flow and organization of the site to make the experience more user-friendly and intuitive. Bottom line: we failed, but we’ve been doing everything we possibly can, working day and night, to get this marketplace fully functional. And we’re delighted to report that it is now up and running at http://unreasonableinstitute.org/finalists!

So What? Failure happens. And publicly too. But if handled with integrity and transparency, it cannot only be a tremendous learning opportunity, but a chance to form deeper human connections with your customers / beneficiaries and better serve their needs. All of us here firmly believe that we will be better off for this experience in the long-run because, as our homeboy George Bernard Shaw says, “…reputation grows with every failure.”