3 reasons why you should never give up on your idea

In this episode, I give you three reasons why you should never give up on your idea. I decided to do this episode now because I just recently finished rebuilding my old app Instamour. We originally built it in 2013 as a video dating app, and I actually had the idea for it back in 2006. So it’s actually really old. But I didn’t build it until 2013. Starting in 2017 I decided to rebuild the app as a different platform, and during the pandemic we finished the newest version. The more time goes by, the more I realize that it might have just been the wrong time. The world has changed, and video apps are very popular. So it’s time to give it one more try. Never give up on your ideas, because I sure don’t!

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Here’s the transcript from this podcast episode, please excuse any typos!

So you should never give up on your business, your project, your app, your company, whatever it is, because it’s been so many years. Who cares? Is the idea still good? Is it relevant? In my case, or I’ll say in our case, I pulled team co founders and everything. Hi, Kristin and Eric. We built in 2013, before Instagram released their video feature and right around the same time that bind came out. So smartphones were only a couple of years old. The iPhone was recently invented and camera technology was not that great yet. Here I was building a video dating app. So it might have just been the wrong time. And we learned that because over the years we’ve been building new versions of Instamorph and we recently rebuilt the newest version during the pandemic 2020 and 2021 and released the new version of Instamorph in 2013 to about a month ago. Now we realize this is the right time.

People are used to using video apps such as zoom and FaceTime and tick tock has completely exploded videos are huge. And online streaming is huge. People are now used to consuming video, creating video and watching video. And that’s what instant was all about. It’s all about video. The technology has improved dramatically as well. Our app is beautiful. Now the videos are very quick to load, things have just improved. So this could be for any business that you have. If you feel like it was the wrong time for your idea. And you built it ahead of its time. Maybe now you should give it a shot again and relaunch your idea or business and see if it’s the right time. Another reason or the second reason is it might take you longer than you think to succeed. I mean, I know I bring this up a lot but Thomas Edison it took them 10,000 tries to perfect the lightbulb. If he had given up after the first 100 trials or 1000 trials or even 8546 trials, we would not have the label. So you have to be persistent. You have to be dedicated to your idea, and you can’t give up. One of the most popular things to do in your business or any business. If it’s not working if a particular target is pivoting right you can switch things off, find the thing that is working maybe the things that are not working drop those pivoting is very popular in startups. It’s a way to fail fast and then succeed in other ways by finding verticals or other paths that you can take that might help you succeed quicker. We’ve done that with instant more. Once again, we started out as a dating app. And now we’re just a discovery app. We’re letting you meet friends, roommates, business partners, band mates for your band, single parents, anything. And it’s all about activities and interests. We didn’t have that on the app. But we learned over the past decade. For almost a decade, people don’t really want to date anymore. The pressure of the dating apps and the saturation of those dating apps has caused people to realize that they don’t really want to do that anymore. They want it to be low pressure. Let’s just meet for activities, yoga, hiking, dog walking, coffees, movies, music, and let’s just meet his friends. So that’s a pivot right we pivoted to a different demographic, different type of use case and the last reason and this is not even really a reason because it’s so many different things. I just didn’t want to give you guys like a million points. But you have to prove it to yourself. You’re gonna regret it. If you don’t, if you don’t keep trying. Are you going to prove to yourself that you can come to a conclusion Okay, is it success? Isn’t it a failure? Did you learn something? Of course you did. If you’ve been following my podcast, you’ve learned a lot. Have you inspired others? Have you worked with others and helped others?

What was your goal when you reached the goal? Either way, whatever the situation is in this idea, you have to keep going to come to a conclusion. And that’s the most important thing. This is why you should never give up because I noticed a lot of people, they start something they don’t get the result they want and they quit. That’s not the way to do things. If you’ve listened to my episodes, you know that coming to a conclusion that quickly means that you learned something. And now you have to learn from that and change it. It’s called iteration. failed, iterate, learn, iterate, fail, iterate, learn, iterate over and over and over again. Rinse and repeat until you come to a conclusion that either the idea is good, but it took you a couple of forks in the road to find the right path. Or B. It’s just not a great idea. And you figured that out over time. And now it’s time to close up shop but you’d have to keep going. You know, a lot of people over the years have told me things like Instamorph is just not unique enough or it’s the more it’s not a great idea, or it’s the more was done in the 90s with speed dating with VCR tapes, or there’s too many dating apps and so on and so forth. But here’s the thing: we have still been the only video dating app that ever came out that was as popular as it was in the 2013 to 2016 range of years. And now here we are again. This time we’re coming out in a different way. It is a good idea. It is unique and it still hasn’t been done. Before. So we’re not going to give up until we come to a conclusion at some point in the future.

So you can’t just expect to get a result immediately. As you go through your daily work life, you start achieving minor goals, small tasks, and reaching larger goals and larger tasks. You’ll realize that the timeframe it takes to get to the conclusion is a lot longer than you want. This is why I always tell people not only to never give up but to expect to take years to figure everything out. There were so many companies we can give examples of, of all the famous companies that we use, the Amazons, the Facebook’s, even Elon Musk with SpaceX. How many times did his rockets explode when he was trying to land them again, or take off and he spent hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars trying to take SpaceX to the next level. And he just couldn’t do it but he never gave up. Finally, his rocket took off and landed and that’s when he got his NASA contract which seeds his company. There’s so many stories like this for every entrepreneur or startup out there. You have to keep going until you either can’t go anymore because you ran out of money or because you came to a conclusion that either works or doesn’t work. But it’s never too late to start something up again. You know, there’s so many business ideas out there that maybe you ran out of money or time or customers and it just didn’t work out anymore. But what can you extract from that experience? What can you extract from what you learned that you can put into a new idea? Maybe it’s similar, or maybe it’s not, but you can put that information that you gathered and put it into something new, and then put it out there? Because you should never give up.

Giving up means what are you going to do with your life after that? You’re going to regret it later on. You’re going to be upset that you didn’t push harder. You’re probably going to be bored because if you’re creative like I am you need to be constantly creating stuff or else life just isn’t. It has no meaning. So I’m going to leave you guys with this thought. This is just like a philosophy of mine. One of the things I’ve learned in my long career as an entrepreneur is not only is it never too late to do something but the reason why you should never give up on something even if it’s so hard and stressful and difficult. And it seems like you’re never going to reach your objectives. You have to believe in yourself. That’s the key, believing that you can accomplish your goals and never giving up on them. You have to value yourself. You have to value the people around you, the people that you’re working with. You’d have to make sure that you put everything you have into every idea that you come up with, put your heart, your soul, your blood, sweat, tears, everything. Because if you don’t, again, you will regret it when you’re older. And why would you want to do that? Wouldn’t you want to look back on your years and say II gave it my all. I really poured myself into these things. I feel accomplished, fulfilled. The people around me who I helped. These are the things you should be focusing on. And if you do that, no matter what you have succeeded. That’s the truth. It doesn’t matter how much money you make or how many awards you win. It just matters how you feel about everything at the end of the day and how people around you feel about it as well. So remember that and I want to hear some comments from you as usual in terms of why you should never give up and why you should keep trying to make your ideas work. Maybe I missed some stuff. Tell me about it. I want to hear and I’ll always answer you. Keep on keeping on and I will see you in next week’s episode.

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Author

Jason Sherman