Early in my career, I built something I was sure the market needed. I’d observed a real problem during my time working in industrial settings, and I designed a solution — elegant, functional, technically sound.
I was certain the product would sell itself.
It did not sell itself.
In the months between shipping the first units and shutting down the project, I made every mistake a first-time founder can make. Each one was painful at the time and instructive in retrospect. Here are the mistakes, in order, with the clarity that two decades of distance provides.
Mistake One: I Built in Isolation
Months of development. Months of design work, material selection, prototype testing, and manufacturing specification. During that time, I talked to engineers. I talked to professors. I talked to people who understood the technical side.
I did not talk to a single person who would actually buy the product.
The engineers confirmed the design was elegant. The professors confirmed the engineering was sound. None of them could tell me whether the people who would be the actual purchasers saw this as a problem worth paying to solve.
They didn’t. The problem I’d observed was real — the existing approach was inefficient. But the inefficiency was a marginal cost. My solution required investment, setup time, and training. The ROI was positive but marginal, and buyers with a hundred larger problems to solve weren’t going to prioritize a marginal improvement.
The lesson became the foundation of everything I later taught at Startup Burgenland: talk to twenty customers before building anything. Not people who might buy. People who have the problem and spend money solving it.
Mistake Two: I Priced on Cost, Not Value
My pricing calculation was pure engineering: material cost + manufacturing cost + margin = price. The formula produced a price that was “reasonable” based on my costs.
The problem: nobody prices based on the seller’s costs. They price based on the buyer’s alternatives. The buyer’s alternative was the existing approach, which cost nothing (it was already in place) and worked adequately (just not optimally). My “reasonable” price was being compared to a cost of EUR 0 for the status quo.
I should have priced based on the value created and offered a trial period that let the buyer experience the improvement before committing. Instead, I presented a cost without a compelling value narrative, and every prospect mentally compared my price to “free” and reached the obvious conclusion.
The selling I’d needed to learn started with pricing. Pricing is the first sales conversation: it tells the customer whether you understand their world or just your own.
Mistake Three: I Couldn’t Sell
I was an engineer. Selling felt like begging. The few conversations I had with potential buyers were technically detailed, personally awkward, and commercially ineffective. I described features when I should have described outcomes. I answered technical questions when I should have been asking business questions. I left meetings having demonstrated my engineering competence and completely failed to demonstrate the product’s business value.
This experience — the visceral discomfort of trying to sell something for the first time — is why I wrote how I learned to sell and why the 70/30 rule is so central to what I teach. The best product in the world is worthless if nobody knows about it and nobody can be convinced to try it.
Mistake Four: I Didn’t Know When to Stop
The project should have ended at month six, when the evidence was clear: low demand, marginal value proposition, no repeatable sales process. Instead, I spent another twelve months trying to make it work — redesigning the product, adjusting the price, attending trade shows, sending catalogs.
Each month of continuation cost money, time, and emotional energy that could have been directed toward something with a better signal. The subtraction audit — which I wouldn’t develop for another fifteen years — is precisely the tool I needed. A structured assessment of what was working and what wasn’t, with the discipline to cut what wasn’t.
I didn’t have the tool. I had stubbornness. Stubbornness is useful for surviving hard periods. It’s terrible for recognizing when a period isn’t just hard but terminal.
What the Failure Produced
The project lost money and months of effort. The five business failures that shaped my career started here, and this first one taught the most fundamental lesson: the market doesn’t owe you anything because your product is good.
Good products that solve real, expensive, urgent problems for people who are actively looking for solutions — those sell. Good products that solve marginal problems for people who are managing fine with what they have — those gather dust.
The failure also taught me that starting small doesn’t mean starting poorly. It means starting with a version that can test the market hypothesis before you’ve invested nine months and EUR 12,000 in the engineering. If I’d built a crude prototype in week two and shown it to ten plant managers, I’d have learned in a month what instead took eighteen months and a failed product to discover.
I was young and thought I had it figured out. I didn’t. Nobody does early in their career. But the mistakes made early — made cheaply, learned deeply — became the foundation for everything I built after.
The origin story isn’t inspiring. It’s instructive. And the instruction was: build for the customer, not for the engineer.
