ESYB2 094 - Failing On My Own But Growing and Learning
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[00:00:00] In this video, I want to share with you the part of my entrepreneurship journey after I left my job and became an entrepreneur full time, which was really stressful. And what gave me the courage to do that is my previous failed business ideas gave me enough learnings that I felt like, oh, I can really do this now.

Whereas I always thought that, but it wasn't true, but I really felt like, okay, I have enough foundational knowledge now. And my previous failed businesses gave me something else. And this is like mid 2000s, 2007, something like this. I noticed that when I was putting up websites, they were starting to rank pretty quickly in Google search.

And I started learning about Google search. Which gave me the marketing background, not by learning in a class, which is fine to do, but actually by trying it in the real world with my website. And again, that's a practical learning that you get by tinkering. You just bring [00:01:00] yourself a little further along each time.

And each time you have some lessons and failures that you use for the rest of your career. And so I started to become Decent, not good yet. Add search engine optimization, which is how to get traffic from Google search. And so that gave me the courage of like, Hey, I know how to pick business ideas now. I know how to promote them a little bit.

And so the next business idea I had was a group hiking website. You can think of it as a meetup for hikers. And I thought it would be easy to do because I would make it free and meet up charges, organizers, and I thought that organizers, because it's free, would flock to my business. And they totally did.

So I put up the website, and they totally didn't. Because for organizers, it was, like, really cheap to create their hikes on it. And then they would get a lot of hikers from Meetup, where my site was almost not trafficked too much. So I had a hard time generating traffic. And so, pretty early on, I saw, okay, this [00:02:00] business idea failed, just like all the other ones.

But instead of letting it fail, I thought, I'd give it one more chance. I'll make, I'll run my own events, my own hikes, but I'll make them super flashy. And at that moment, I lived in San Francisco in the United States. And if you're not familiar with the geography of San Francisco, it's a city that's surrounded by water on three sides, meaning that there are many ships and boats that crashed on the rocks of San Francisco and sunk.

And you can see those during low tide, but many residents don't even know about it. So I actually organized a hike. What was called shipwreck hunt during low tide. It was named something very mysterious. And I tried to get attention. That hike got picked up by the local major newspaper. And they published me on the front page of the what to do this weekend section.

And I actually didn't know about it. Until the day of the hike when I came and I was expecting just a few people to come [00:03:00] who registered on my website. But instead like two A hundred people came, and then I started doing these flashy hikes, like this theme one week, another theme another week, something with Star Wars, something with history, something seasonal.

And actually, that website started getting promoted in a lot of newspapers and big websites that covered the local city. And I started getting a little famous, but even more than that, because of all this coverage. The way that search engine optimization worked was that because everybody was mentioning my website and linking to my website, my website started ranking in Google really, really highly for very competitive keywords and I started getting traffic.

So I came up with this amazing business idea, which was really something that in that era, like from 2000, from the year 2000 to the year 2010 plus, a lot of big companies you know now, like Zillow [00:04:00] for real estate, Travelpedia or all these giant websites. They built a lot of traffic by ranking for every possible city.

So like, you can search Zillow for every city in the world. They'll have a page of what real estate is available. Or same like that with many other websites that cover different cities. And so I did the same thing. I have, I had a database of all the parks in the world of all the wildlife you can see in the world and overnight because I was a programmer, I was able to generate like 500, 000 pages on my website, which all ranked highly because of that SEO strength that my events got me.

So not only this events were being successful and not. Crazy successful, but successful in its local market. But it gave my website this crazy strength for SEO to rank in Google. And overnight, I had like, what used to be called a content farm. So, many large companies grew [00:05:00] on this. Around 2012, Google published, or 2011, 2010, I don't remember now, but there was a huge update in Google where they penalized it.

But before they penalized this, this was my first success, because every time I would wake up in the morning and I would look at the analytics of my website and the traffic, it would go like up and to the right, up and to the right, up and to the right, just growing like crazy. If you're looking from where you are, the chart would look like this, right?

From small to bigger, bigger, bigger. And every day was more traffic because I had all these pages and I had all this SEO. And I was having ads on all these pages. Not only that, I was selling products for hiking on all these pages when it's making money. And then when this SEO update happened by Google.

Like every morning I went, I woke up and the first thing I did was I went to check my analytics to see what happened the day before and I saw it like this. You see, I had it like I'm, I'm doing it for me. The chart would be up into the right like this. The way you're looking, the [00:06:00] chart up into the right would be like this.

And so it's up, up, up, up, up for a long time. It's amazing. And then just a crater, just a crater. The business died. And I tried to resuscitate that business and did all the techniques that were good to do, but I just could not. And can you imagine, for years I've been building up to this. I don't know how to explain it, but there was some tears, not external tears, but in internal tears.

It was a hard thing because excited, excited, excited, excited. And that took a little bit of getting over, not too long, because I had no other option, I had to figure out something. But what I realized was, okay, [00:07:00] I built a successful thing, even though it ultimately failed, it was working. Now I know marketing.

Now I know how to build a business. Now I know entrepreneurship. But you know what? Something was missing, because I realized. Why did it take years is because I had no actual real support. I had to learn just about everything on my own, through my own hard work, through my own failure. It was not the best way to go.

The best way to go was for me to get help. And so I realized the next business idea that I'm going to pursue is I'm going to help other people who are starting out in entrepreneurship to get the support that I never had. So in the next video, I'll share with you what happened when I started a business to help other entrepreneurs who were struggling with the same things that I was not getting enough help.

So we'll talk about how that next business went in the next video.

