Failure sucks. Yes, it really does. When you fail to close a round of investment, when you fail your customers with what you’ve promised, when you screw up on your marketing campaign and waste all your money on google ads with very little results, when you tell your friends that your startup didn’t work out… It really sucks, big time. However, it is when you think about why you failed that you realise how important it is…

“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” Samuel Beckett

Entrepreneurship is hard and success doesn’t just come over night. When building a startup, you make mistakes, all the time. Maybe, it’s your first time at managing a team and you screw up by setting the wrong expectations. Failure is inevitable. But truth is, as long as you fail, you’re learning. You learn from your own mistakes and you do it differently next time.

At Beta-i, we’ve came across many entrepreneurs who struggled with several different issues. We interviewed many of them, under a European project called LIFE – Failing Forward, to understand their mistakes and concerns. Our main goal was for failure not to be a tabu. We wanted to know the common mistakes startups in Portugal were making and to let others know about it so that we could all learn from it.

Passion is the key

We’ve spoken to the founders of Mougli, our Lisbon Challenge alumni, by the time they were selling their company. Mougli was the winner of their batch and the first exit of a Lisbon Challenge startup. However, despite the successful outcome, they also struggled with many issues, as all entrepreneurs do. So, what did they learn while building Mougli? And what will they do differently next time? Gaspard and Bruno, built Mougli because they spot a problem that many people had and they felt the need to tackle it. At the time, one of the issues they had was that they wanted to get everything done and they weren’t really focussing on solving the main problem. They also realised they weren’t solving a problem that they felt passionate about, they identified a business opportunity and built a solution for it. Nonetheless, they felt that their main struggle was the team, like in every other startup. “The team is like a couple, you need the perfect match and to agree on the skills needed, the vision, etc.” says Bruno, co-founder of Mougli. When talking about the team, Bruno and Gaspard felt the need for different skills, in the beginning, for example, they didn’t have anyone with a business background. So, in the end, not having the right team and skills can make things more difficult.

So, what happened after Mougli was acquired? Well, Bruno and Gaspard decided it was time for a new adventure. They founded a new startup, called Dayafterday, and embraced their passion for art and creativity by building a platform to discover the content that best suits you.

Not having the right team is a huge disadvantage

We also interviewed Pedro Veloso, founder of Limetree, a Portuguese startup that ended up shutting down because they didn’t have the right skill-set to tackle a B2C product. As Pedro Veloso says: “we didn’t have the ‘Team Market Fit’, if you can put it this way”. Many people talk about the importance of having the right team but, for Pedro, this is not just a matter of people getting along with each other, it’s about having the right skills. Launching a B2C product is tough and if you don’t have the skills you need within your team to go to the market, it gets even tougher. In the end, Pedro Veloso and Limetree couldn’t raise the investment they needed to scale their startup and took the decision to shut it down. “The thing with building a startup is that you believe you’re succeeding. You don’t see failure after failure after failure, you see success after success… until you fail.”

However, despite all the mistakes entrepreneurs make, it’s important to keep going forward, to keep failing forward. Let’s tell these stories and spread it around. Join us at Failing Forward 2015, a startup conference on failure, that will take place this October, in Brussels. All you have to do to learn from other entrepreneurs and listen to their stories on failure, is register here.