My first paying client came when I was eighteen years old. I put together a complete package for a hairdresser — branding, website, the works — for somewhere between EUR 2,000 and 3,000. It was the first time someone handed me real money for work I had done, and the lessons from that experience shaped everything I built afterward.
But the product failure that taught me the most came later, when I attempted to package my consulting frameworks into a downloadable resource. I spent months building it, polished the design, wrote what I thought was a compelling sales page, and launched it.
The response was underwhelming. The product was, by any honest measure, a failure.
But the failure was educational in a way that no success could have been. It taught me three foundational lessons that I’ve applied to every product since — including the twelve products at Vulpine Creations, all of which succeeded.
What I Built and Why
I was feeling the ceiling of trading time for money. Every article I read about “passive income” and “productized services” suggested that packaging your expertise into a product was the path to scaling without working more hours.
The toolkit was my attempt. I took the frameworks and templates I used with consulting clients — innovation canvases, prioritization matrices, ideation tools — cleaned them up, wrote explanatory guides for each one, and packaged them as a downloadable bundle.
The logic seemed sound: consulting clients paid me thousands for these tools. Surely, individual innovators and smaller teams would pay for the same tools without the consulting engagement.
The logic was wrong. Not because the tools were bad — they were genuinely useful — but because I’d made three fundamental mistakes that I see other founders repeat constantly.
Mistake 1: I Built Without Validating
The biggest mistake — and the most common one I see in early-stage founders — was building for three months without once asking a potential customer whether they’d buy this.
I talked to colleagues about the idea. They said it was great. I talked to existing clients. They said it was interesting. I talked to my wife. She said she was proud of me. None of these people were potential customers for this specific product.
The people who would actually buy a EUR 49 innovation toolkit — team leaders at small companies, startup founders, independent consultants — were never consulted. I assumed that because consulting clients valued these tools, a self-serve version would sell. That assumption was wrong.
Had I run what I now call the 5-Conversation Sprint, I would have discovered in one week what took me months to learn: the target audience didn’t want templates. They wanted guidance. Templates without a consultant to help apply them felt overwhelming, not enabling. The product solved the wrong problem.
This is the lesson I hammer into every founder I work with: validate before you build. Not after. Not during. Before. Five conversations with potential buyers is faster, cheaper, and more reliable than any amount of internal analysis.
Mistake 2: I Marketed to Nobody Specific
My marketing for the toolkit was aimed at “anyone interested in innovation.” The sales page talked about “teams” and “organizations” and “innovators” without specifying which teams, what type of organizations, or what kind of innovators.
The result was that nobody read the sales page and thought “this is for me.” It was for everyone, which meant it was for no one. The language was broad, the examples were generic, and the value proposition was fuzzy.
Compare that to what we did at Vulpine Creations. Every product was designed for and marketed to a specific audience: serious amateur and professional magicians who valued quality craftsmanship and creative presentation. Our marketing spoke directly to this person. Our product descriptions used language this person used. Our photography showed the product in contexts this person understood.
The specificity made Vulpine products sell. The generality made my toolkit flop. Same quality of product. Different precision of marketing.
If I were launching the toolkit today, the sales page would start with something like: “You’re a startup founder with a team of 5-15 people. You know you need to innovate but you can’t afford a consultant. Your team meetings about ‘new ideas’ turn into unfocused brainstorming sessions that produce nothing actionable.” That’s a person. That’s a problem. That’s what I should have written from the start.
The ICP template exists because of this mistake. Defining your ideal customer with surgical precision isn’t optional. It’s the foundation of everything.
Mistake 3: I Launched and Hoped
My launch strategy was: publish the sales page, share it on social media, send it to my small email list, and hope. That was the entire plan. No pre-launch building. No beta testing. No influencer outreach. No follow-up campaign. Launch and hope.
This is shockingly common among first-time product builders. You invest so much energy in creating the product that by launch day, you’re exhausted and just want it to be out there. Marketing feels like an afterthought because the building consumed everything.
What I know now — and what the toolkit launch taught me — is that the launch is not the end of the building process. It’s the beginning of the marketing process. And the marketing process should actually start before the building process.
At Vulpine, our product launches followed a deliberate sequence: tease the product two weeks before launch (building anticipation), release behind-the-scenes content one week before (building interest), offer early access to our email list the day before (creating urgency), and launch publicly with a coordinated campaign (maximizing visibility). Each product launch was an event, not an announcement.
The toolkit launch was an announcement. A quiet one. To a small audience that wasn’t particularly interested.
Ship it ugly is right — you should ship before it’s perfect. But shipping without a distribution plan is shipping into a void. The product can be ugly. The distribution plan can’t be absent.
What I Did With the Failure
After the initial disappointment faded — which took about three weeks of self-pity — I did something useful with the failure. I analyzed it.
I emailed the people who had bought the toolkit and asked them three questions: What made you buy? What was most useful? What was disappointing? The responses were illuminating:
- Most buyers were consultants (like me) who wanted tools for their own clients — not the end-users I’d imagined
- The most useful pieces were the simplest templates, not the complex frameworks
- The biggest disappointment was the lack of guidance on how and when to use each tool
This feedback taught me that the product had found a different market than I intended (consultants, not end-users), that simplicity beat complexity (opposite of what I’d assumed), and that context mattered more than content (when and how to use something mattered more than having it).
I never relaunched the toolkit. But the lessons from the feedback directly shaped my consulting practice and later my product thinking at Vulpine. We made Vulpine products simple to use, included detailed instructional materials, and targeted a very specific buyer. Three corrections for three mistakes.
The Lasting Impact
That failed product is the most valuable thing I’ve ever built. Not for the modest revenue it generated. For the education.
Every product I’ve shipped since follows three rules derived from that failure:
- Validate before building. Talk to potential buyers first. Always. No exceptions.
- Build for a specific person. Not “anyone interested in X.” A specific person with a specific problem.
- Plan distribution before starting production. How will this reach people? If the answer is “I’ll figure it out later,” don’t start building yet.
These rules have a 100% track record since I started following them. Not every product has been a massive success, but none has been the kind of total mismatch that the toolkit was. The rules prevent the worst failures, which is more valuable than causing the best successes.
When people see the Vulpine Creations exit — twelve products, 4.9-star rating, sold in 2024 — they see the success. They don’t see the earlier product that failed and taught me everything I needed to know to make Vulpine work.
Key takeaways:
- Validate before you build — five conversations with actual potential buyers in one week reveals more than three months of building in isolation.
- Market to a specific person with a specific problem — “anyone interested in X” produces zero traction; a named persona produces real buyers.
- Plan your distribution strategy before starting production — the product can be imperfect, but the launch plan can’t be absent.
- When a product fails, survey the people who did buy — their answers often reveal a different market, a simpler need, or a missing piece you didn’t see.
- Failures are educational investments — the lessons from one failed product can inform and improve every product you build afterward.
