Raj Dandage, along with his partners Ash Nadkarni, and Anagha Nadkarni created AppGuppy, a way to let anyone make their own mobile app within five minutes and five steps, and to distribute it outside of app stores. He was one of the presenters at NY Tech Meetup that had a great success story, but he shared his thoughts about dealing with mistakes at a startup to help others that may be facing the same difficulties.
“You are making mistakes every day — like sometimes people try to connect me with other people and I don’t get a chance to make the meeting or don’t get a chance to tell them in time. Things like that always happen. What I’ve always done was take the bull by the horns and email them and apologize, ‘I’m really sorry that this couldn’t happen.
Generally, those types of connections don’t work out. People really don’t leave much room for mistakes and failures. But you bitch, you moan and get it out of your system. You tell yourself maybe that’s a connection lost, I’ll find another one.
“You also are having triumphs every day. I remember when we were trying to figure out the appropriate marketing plan for musicians, we had this incredible success. We figured out our best optimal customer and we needed to get a certain amount of attraction into the company by our demo day. We were sitting there making mistake after mistake on how to approach and get these people in the platform.
“But again, it’s about getting it out of your system, making the mistake, trying it out and moving on. What we did was look analytically at all of our failures to see where they were coming from. Then we found a really, really successful marketing strategy, and it’s been two weeks since we launched our product.
By implementing that strategy, after a series of mistakes, we have achieved 400 users in 16 days — which is very large. Considering our alpha, we got thousands in three months and we’re already close to half of that within a couple of weeks. I would say absolutely we make mistakes as a company on a regular basis. But our approach is not only to move on, but to think about our mistakes analytically think about where we take that information, and we move on to a success.”
