Failure Is an Option

One thing you hear in entrepreneurship a lot is that you want to fail fast. In the classroom environment, failing sounds catastrophic. However in the entrepreneurship classroom, failing is part of the process. I myself have failed epicly, my first venture Uconvo dying after two and a half years of hard work. I learned a lot from that failure, however I have never shared these failures with the public. So here today is an unofficial post mortem of Uconvo.

Uconvo was an LLC founded to help bring clarity to the college search process. We provided video chats with current students to those looking to attend those institutions so that they could get first hand unbiased information from students themselves. The premise was interesting but we soon learned a good idea does not a business plan make.

We started out heaving recruiting for students. We ended up getting over 50 schools, all of the ivy league institutions, and most of the big names in Texas on board. We had hundreds of representatives, a working website, a small self funded marketing budget, but we were missing a huge component - customers.

We bet on the fact that students or their parents would be willing to pay for this service. However after more market research we could see we messed up. Our true customer should have been the universities. They would be motivated to pay for this service to better attract applicants and attract students. The schools could even handle their own recruitment! So many of our hurdles would have been solved if we had realized this sooner.

At the end of two and a half years though, we had lost many of our representatives due to legal delays and fear of contracting taxes. We lost momentum, and were losing money. My co-founder and I decided it was time to call it quits, and thus Uconvo died. However failure was always an option and I am happy it happened at a time where my risks were minimal and the education value was great.

-Kylie Moden