Lessons from the Workshop
Every prototype is tuition.
The prototype that failed wasn't wasted money. It was the price of a lesson you couldn't have read in a book.
By Michael O'Callaghan ·
Founders often describe an abandoned build with something close to shame. Six months. A team. A version nobody used.
I'd rather treat it as tuition. You paid for a lesson, and the only real waste would be to walk away without collecting it.
The question I ask is never "why did it fail?" It's "what do you now know that you couldn't have known before?" That answer is usually the most valuable asset in the company.
Cheap tuition is the goal — smaller bets, faster feedback, tighter loops. But no tuition at all means no learning, and no learning means you're building the product right before you know it's the right product.