My Biggest Failure (so far)

beatitude oh I wanted to talk about failure so if that's a good start there have been a number of times in my professional career while I have failed at things thus most spectacular of them mean it's hard to say without like there's always you're always on a spectrum of failure but I think probably the thing that I'm most frustrated by is wizard school which was a game is a game that I developed with a friend of mine with art by Karen Hallion whose amazing and she did such an amazing job I was working with Eric who has developed games before both in terms of like developing games that are fun to play and also getting them made and distributed and meeting deadlines and I've just I've never missed a deadline like that one lizzie bennet diaries we had some serious miss deadlines with the dvds it has turned me off from doing anything in that world heavily and I feel very bad we are we finally have the wizard school expanded that it's actually sitting right over here the cards are part of why this took so long is that like we developed new game mechanics that hopefully for people who are dedicated to playing this game make it a little easier to play a little faster to play there's like a summer school kind of this is the idea of it there's like a summer summertime there's summertime cards like we've got imposter syndrome and ecology can this is all part of the hanks dirty dirty little secrets pack so it's got a bunch of cards that are somewhat specific to my high school experience which I now realize was a very long time ago there's a spice Goats card the fact it took a huge amount of time to do that part of that was in my camp just writing the cards took longer than I expected part of it was game development and then a huge part of it was manufacturing which printing cards is a known quantity people should not have been as hard as it was but it is hugely difficult and I apologize so much to all of the people who waited so long for this it's been literal years and you know I was holding up the card just now this does not look like years of work and and so I consider it to be a failure and it also like the game itself is hard to play like it's that rules are quite complicated and you have to be pretty into the game to play it we should have developed something that was simpler and more easy to play right out of the box and the less like scratching your head about what phase of the turn you're in and so I feel like that was a big big mess up it was a thing that we made that we did that you know financially at this point it's it's in the red luckily that's not a huge problem for for dftba games like we can figure that out and get everybody the things that they need and offer up refunds to everybody who wants refunds which we've done if you're curious about that you could check Kickstarter if you are a backer and you were like oh I didn't know refunds were available go check out the Kickstarter we will soon be sending stuff out that's like fill this out if you if your address has changed and we have gonna send you the thing who we said we were gonna send you years ago and it's been sitting on my brain for all that time feeling like I'm letting people down and and so like the only thing to do was to you know try and yell at people who were being slow and maybe I should have done that more and better but I also like part of part of my I don't know half like half times super power half time you know greatest weakness is like I I'm never doing one thing at a time and so when when like there's always something else to focus on like literally right now I should probably be wearing a pod gun I definitely don't think of those things these things in terms of like failure happens when you know you never get out of the red I feel like failure happens when you let people down if suddenly we had to like lay off about people from our companies that would feel like I'm you know pretty big failure or if I had invested like all of everything into something and that hadn't succeeded and then I had to you know I was destitute that would feel like a failure if I was like gunning for some kind of but ultimately I think this is like what is the biggest failure or what feels like the biggest failure is when it's the opposite of what you imagined as the biggest success and so there isn't any projects I've ever done that like the goal was to like build a billion dollar company and so when they don't make money it doesn't feel like that's not like the big failure that I didn't make a billion dollar company the big like ultimately I'm trying to make stuff that makes people happy and so the failure is when it makes them sad even the little things sometimes that happens like it like inevitably in events you will make people sad because you can't invite certain creators to events and that gonna that's going to frustrate them and to make them feel underappreciated and inevitably you know you put something in the wrong room and a thousand people want to go to it but it's a 500-person room and you just estimated incorrectly or you weren't able to shift it in time and like then there's five hundred people who feel really let down and that also feels like a failure the money side of things is all about sustainability of the of the product whether it can continue to exist and so I I do sometimes have people ask me like when do you consider a thing a success ultimately a thing is not successful until it is economically sustainable but it isn't a failure because it's not economically sustainable because something ends I don't see that as because it failed maybe I should maybe that that would be the correct syntax could be like the correct use of the English language but so maybe I would say that it failed it's just that I don't I don't internalize that as a failure to me that seems like a risk that was taken it's like you know trying a dance move and you fall down like okay you might have looked super cool but it turned out you didn't look super cool but like you have to fall down sometimes in order to have other dance moves that look good things like that's what I came up with having a non successful business that's like you try things and sometimes it doesn't work for example we will soon be sending out to the people who bought through there fail packages will be sending out that the ones that we've made and refunding them the money for for those because truth or fail did not catch on and I think for a lot of interesting reasons but ultimately like I the only way in which I feel that truth or fail was so this is if you are not aware truth or fail is a trivia game that we were trying to get to sell to like Student Union's pubs libraries and and just like have like a easy accessible trivia game that people could play and come together into a physical space and it would have a video version and just a slideshow hosted version and I like this idea I think it's a great idea and I just don't think that the I don't think that we have the ability to like just like grab the market by its lapels and be like here here I've got this product for you I got a why don't I just don't have the I don't have the expertise in that kind of sales still think it's a good idea and the only way I feel that it is a failure is like the amount of time that people put into it and of course people were paid for that time but like they were working on a really cool project they had like they made really great stuff that isn't going to become like you know that isn't going to become a sustainable thing that they will get to continue to do and I think that everybody Wharton on the project was excited about working on the project even though they were working really hard and also like probably putting an extra hours to make this thing a thing and ultimately it's on my shoulders that I didn't foresee the market correctly for this product or maybe didn't do enough market research but anyway so like I feel bad for the people who worked on it I don't feel bad that it wasn't successful I just I feel bad that like you know a lot of people's great creative energy went into a thing that it's now going to have to find other ways to come out into the world and and those things will come out in the world in various ways but who knows I feel like I've been trying to make truth or fail work for a decade I think it's been eight years well more than that like nine maybe nine years since I've been uh I mean in truth or feel did work once upon a time if you know what that is good for you I'm not going to explain the original truth or failed in truth or fail is also a segment on scishow tangents so it has it's like it's life there as well the failure of wizard school is definitely weighs on me more heavily because that failure is like letting that a lot of people who trusted me to make a great product and one the product isn't that good if you are a dedicated hard hardcore wizard school player I want to give you the biggest high five of all time because I think there is fun to be had in this game but I particularly think that it's beautiful like that color scheme is so good and the art is so I Karen did such a great job and the artist the designer who did the the card layouts did a great job and I know a lot of people feel that down I know most people feel like oh that thing still exists but for the people who do feel like you know they got let down by me and I kind of can't trust me as much anymore like that's huge for me what I want to do less is rely on like this like community of people who you know who trust me because that is too valuable to be leveraging you know especially when like wizard school I might let them down and like you know sour that relationship ultimately my hope is that the the value that people get from vlogbrothers are from scishow or from crash course isn't in part due to like you know some kind of connection and like trust understanding that like I want nothing more than to like make life better for other people and if there is a perception that like oh this was all built in order to sell card games or you know tickets to events or something then let you know you start to wonder if any of it was ever real and then like that like if you like destroy someone's faith and something that they really believe in that's terrible and that's why it pisses me off so much when like YouTube creators like sell their audiences on gambling sites when their audiences are 12 I'm fine YouTube man this place is wild like it's it's interesting for me to analyze the the parts of it that get me the worst that like it's not so much losing money I've done sponge of different things that have lost money that that like you know cost one hundred or two hundred thousand dollars and made like a hundred and fifty or a hundred and twenty thousand dollars and like that's a sting for sure and that's usually was in the context of a larger budget so like there is money to take these risks with you know those losses are very educational usually and and so there's been plenty of times when we've especially in the conference world try to tried to make something work that didn't work and and lost money I've never had to go bankrupt ever had to do a bankruptcy filing so that's good but in business like you try new initiatives all the time and and some of them you know you spend a lot of money on something that's not that turns out to not be something that's gonna turn into revenue to me if you have a 50% chance of making like creating a new sustainable thing you've got you just got to do it because like one you got the chance that it will become sustainable and two even if it doesn't you will have gained value from that experience you will have learned you will have managed you will have you know you will know new people you will know new things about the world that are going to come in handy at other points in life and unless like there's a bet a place to spend the money which there very well might be then like that's the threshold for me like it's not I don't need a 90% chance of success I need I need like a 50% chance of success though I will say Rolf is an amazing game and I love playing Rolf and that has another dftba games game developed with a different person and I love it and we do have lots of copies of that at the dftba warehouse so that game I am interested in marketing and selling in other ways but because it's I think it's great I think it's just a lot of fun to play truth or fail got closed down probably some other things I'll do over the years are gonna stop being things after being things for a while like the fact that scishow and crash course are entering their eighth year is nuts like it should things TV shows don't last that long so that's great and weird and wonderful and I'm so happy and like and you know we're having our 10th VidCon in Anaheim this year and and like total problem I think like our 14th or 15th VidCon that's not always how things go so I'm aware that like there's hits and there's misses I'm another miss we have way more of these calendars than we sold you guys and we don't want to have to recycle all of them so we've just counted them to $10 and if you want an absolutely gorgeous Pizza John calendar with all these good basis on it sometimes you missed the mark a little bit on your order estimates and now we've got too many so if you want to order those I mean not saying we didn't sell a lot we sold a lot thank you to everybody who bought one it's all for charity by the way so you're even if you're like oh I paid more than $10 for that it meant to charity don't worry about it but yes we would love to have those see their usefulness played out if you are interested in that era I'll put a link in the description but two backers of the wizard school project who haven't got all of their perks yet years later I feel like a dick

Channel: hankschannel

Views: 126,308

Keywords: hank green, failure, business

Id: n-IH8Xdy5D4

Length: 15min 26sec (926 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 04 2019