Why My 12 Failures Built MarketBeat
Published on
Matt Paulson
@MediaKing·Mar 6
I have 12 failed businesses.
Audiobooktopia. Podman. WP Mechanic. P2P Lending News. And more.
People see MarketBeat and assume I have the golden touch.
What they don't see is the decade of failed experiments that preceded it.
Everyone sees MarketBeat and assumes it was a straight shot up and to the right. In reality, it was paved by 12 busted projects with names you barely remember and revenue you definitely do not. Those “failures” were not wasted time, they were tuition payments. Each one bought a new skill, a sharper instinct, and a clearer sense of what the market actually wanted.
The Psychology Behind It
Most people treat a failed business like a broken identity: “I’m not an entrepreneur.” Matt treated each one like a broken experiment: “That didn’t work, but I learned X.” When you detach self-worth from outcomes, you can run more experiments. More experiments mean more chances to stumble into a MarketBeat-sized win while everyone else is still nursing their first disappointment.
What 12 Failures Really Built
- Audience: Every project collected emails, readers, or listeners Matt could bring to the next idea.
- Speed: Launching and killing projects quickly became a repeatable habit, not a crisis.
- Signal radar: Each flop clarified which features, niches, and offers actually made money.
- Emotional callus: After 12 nos, one more no stopped being scary, which made bold yeses possible.
Others Who Won With Losing First
Spanx founder Sara Blakely spent seven years failing in sales jobs before turning that rejection training into a billion-dollar shapewear brand.
Dyson burned through 5,000+ prototypes of vacuum cleaners before one design finally sucked in the way customers would pay for.
Airbnb tried wild side-projects like selling Obama O’s cereal during the 2008 election before doubling down on the one thing people actually wanted: unique, bookable stays.
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