Wellington
You’ve got to admire a business when it realises its time to pull the pin, cash in its chips,decide enough’s enough, or whatever other term to describe shutting shop.
So it is with
allaboutthestory.com
, a two year oldinternet start up that sought to link newspaper and magazine editors looking for a story, withwriters. There’s a sticK January 2011 story on AATS
At the time of its launch, co-founder Julie Starr reckoned the site was always going to be anexperiment. Starr, like everyone else in the world, was, and still is trying to figure out hownewspapers, journalism and writers are going to play out and pay out in an, often free, internetworld.
AATS was an attempt to find a middle ground in this constantly evolving space – satisfyingeditors, rewarding writers and allowing the site to clip the ticket for the connection. The sitegoes offline at the end of February, and
As Starr notes in a letter to its numerous stakeholders, while there’s a demand for this kindof content and marketplace, overall the opportunity isn’t compelling enough to take any further.In other words, there’s not enough money to bother carrying on.
And in this case, it’s not failure, its experience.
Starr says its been a “very affordable education”, and having learned and enjoyed the wholeexperience, will be much better prepared for the next internet play she’s involved with – evenif she’s not sure at this stage what it will be.
The awareness and willingness to shut up shop, early, is part of what the
It’s worth repeating this sustainable failure notion.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, it is crucial to understand that if you seekto innovate you will fail – repeatedly . So rather than swing for the fences every time,you have to be able to sustain failure.
That means that you can’t marry your ideas. You start small. See what gains traction. Beprepared to reverse direction once you realize you are headed down a blind alley. You haveunlimited bites at the apple, as long as you don’t try to swallow it whole.
And that’s the great thing about innovation. It never has to end, but is a path that you cancontinue down for a lifetime. If you’re lucky, others will carry the torch for you even beyondthat. We do, as Issac Newton remarked, stand on the shoulders of giants and if we are true to ourpurpose, others can stand on ours.
In that sense there are no limits, except of course, the ones we build for ourselves.
sticK looks forward to Starr’s next venture.