How To Fail Like Amazon
"If I had to live my life again, I’d make the same mistakes, only sooner." - Tallulah Bankhead
You’ve definitely heard of Amazon Prime. You’re probably a customer.
But Amazon has countless products you’ve never heard about. Two of my favorites are Treasure Truck and Single Cow Burgers.
Treasure Truck
Treasure Truck was a Bezos original idea. Imagine an ice cream truck for adults. You receive a text with deals of the day. Minutes later, you hear bells and whistles blaring—the sound of Treasure Truck entering your neighborhood. Instead of kids on bikes racing to grab a bomb pop or ice cream sandwich, hoards of adults stumble from their stoops like zombies in a cloud of consumption to buy more crap they don’t need.
The truck carried hot deals—everything from steaks to paddleboards—at huge discounts. Bezos imagined it as a utopia. When I say it out loud, it feels more dystopian to me.
You’ve never heard of Treasure Truck because it was a bust. The concept was a logistical nightmare. The software was riddled with bugs. GeekWire described the Treasure Truck launch as, “quickly reaching the status of the most-bungled product launch in Amazon history.”
The project was never profitable. As quickly as they appeared in Bezos’ head, the trucks vanished from the streets. They’re little more than a memory to the people on the project, and a page or two in a recent book about Amazon.
Single Cow Burgers
Single Cow Burgers were another Amazon disaster. The idea also began with Bezos. In a Washington Post article about ground beef, he learned how a single hamburger could contain meat from dozens of different cows. The blend of beef was a boon to the meat production process. But it was a disappointment to the palate.
When Bezos learned a burger made from the meat of a single cow would taste better, he assigned an Amazon exec to get it done. The exec delegated the task to Megan Rosseter, a product manager on a culinary innovations team.
Although most ranches had no interest in producing a single cow burger, Rosseter and her team found one in San Diego willing to accept the challenge. She worked with the ranch to source the burger. She worked with her team to package and transport the burger. And they launched the Single Cow Burger on Amazon in 2016.
But Bezos was unhappy.
At an 80:20 lean to fat ratio, the patties dripped fat into his grill and caused annoying flare ups.
It was back to the drawing board for Rosseter and the culinary innovations team.
This time, they found a ranch in Georgia that could provide a single cow burger with a 91:9 lean to fat ratio. Along with a better fat balance, the team improved the packaging and re-launched in January 2017.
This time Bezos was happy. However, as I recount this story, the Single Cow Burger appears to be permanently out of stock on Amazon.
Add another failure to the growing list.
Failure as a stepping stone
Mistakes. Failures. Efforts with no return on investment. They’re different words for the same results. But the outcome isn’t negative.
In his acceptance speech for the 2019 Portrait of a Nation Prize, Bezos began, “My life is based on a large series of mistakes...Every interesting thing I’ve ever done, every important thing I’ve ever done, every beneficial thing I’ve ever done, has been through a cascade of experiments and mistakes and failures.”
Amazon is the corporate giant we all know today as a result of their collective failures. We’re familiar with the stunning successes—the Primes, the Alexas, the Kindles, and the Whole Foods acquisitions. But those successes—each and every one—were built on the backs of countless failures.
Each swing and miss and every money losing venture were accompanied by experience and lessons. Megan Rosseter learned to partner and negotiate with obscure suppliers. Her team learned logistics lessons and navigated packaging pitfalls. Those lessons didn’t die with the Single Cow Burger. Amazon applied the collective learnings to their next project. The team members applied their experiences to future forks on their career paths.
When it’s happening, a failure feels like the end. In one sense, it is the end. But when one project ends, another can begin. And when you begin a new venture equipped with the lessons from your last, you’re one step closer to eventual success.
Thinking back more than a year, I remember how terrible I felt when I decided to give up on the app I built. The decision concluded more than a year of work—work that consumed many of my nights, weekends, and vacations away from my full time job. The decision represented the realization that I would never recoup the $20,000 of my hard earned money I poured into the project. The decision—possibly worst of all—made me face the fact that my idea was bad, my execution was lacking, or I was simply incapable of building a business. Failure felt final.
But of course, it wasn’t.
Eighteen months out from that failure, I’m working as Director of Operations for a different startup. As fate would have it, I’m applying many of the skills I honed while building my app. I’m developing training. I’m teaching contractors to perform repeatable jobs. I’m overseeing production of a media product.
My personal business failure set me up for a professional business success.
The takeaway here isn’t that failure is the goal. The lesson is that you shouldn’t fear failure. The possibility of failure shouldn’t keep you from taking action.
You will fail.
Most of us do, over and over again.
But we learn from those failures. From our experiences, we become better. And only looking back on our paths can we see how our failures contributed to our ultimate successes.
If you never fail, it means you’re not taking big enough chances. You’re not pushing any boundaries. You’re not learning and improving as quickly as you could be.
If you don’t believe me, I don’t blame you. But you should believe Jeff Bezos.
So get started on something.
Get started on taking chances and making bets. Don’t seek failure, but don’t fear it either. Earn your experience through ups and downs. And allow your experiments, mistakes, and failures to cascade into an eventual waterfall of success.
