Why Bedrok will fail

I want to have sobriety in the work I do. I don’t want to be drunken off the idea of a perfect future where everything works out. Like most people, I tend to find ideas that support my own and validate the success of what I do. This is known as the confirmation bias.

What I’ve found out though is that living in this fairy tale world robs you of true conviction. Your ideas are meant to be placed within the real world and bump up against real people. How you think of your product doesn’t measure its success. It’s how other people think of it.

I learned this lesson the hard way when I released a product on Kickstarter a few years back. It’s called Orbit Ellipse Templates, and I didn’t see the writing on the walls until it was too late.

I was lying to myself about the impact this ellipse template could have because I was:

1. Solving for problems that didn’t exist, or
2. Blowing out of proportion the problems that did exist.

And it left me with an inflated sense of Orbits value. There was something deep in me that I knew wasn’t quite right, but didn’t have the heart to admit it to myself.

At this point I already designed and manufactured everything. I already had a Kickstarter page. I already had talked with design teachers around the country about selling it in their departments. Being realistic became too hard because I waited too long to confront it. Now I can finally look back in hindsight and say, “Yeah, it was a cool design. Other than that… Glorified paper weight. I was innovating merely for innovation’s sake.”

But I vowed not to do that again because I learned that ignorance of reality is more crippling than the acknowledgement of it.

I recently remembered an excerpt from The Innovation Stack. The founders of Square in their pitch deck listed “140 reasons why Square will fail”. It’s a genius move. And that became the reason to codify all the (current) reasons in this article why Bedrok will fail. Complete, raw, unfiltered realism. That’s what I need.

I’m not sure why, but I particularly like the world “will”. Not “might” fail or “could” fail, but “will” fail. It shifts the mind to confront the reality that failure is a real option, in spite of your best attempts at success.

I’m setting my rose colored glasses are on the floor. And this list is me stomping on them.

Behold, why Bedrok will fail:

1. Freelancers might find the work boring. That could drive a lot of talent away.
2. Not being able to make a 0% commission marketplace profitable
3. Competition could come along and implement these ideas faster than me, I’m only one person
4. Clients like iteration, and I don’t know if I’ll be able to deliver stuff that they like without iterating.
5. Not being able to convince people to spend a couple thousand or just hundreds of dollars on a platform they’ve never heard of.
6. I’m very cautious to accept outside funding and that might inhibit my ability to grow later
7. I don’t have the skills to build the extra software that I think I’ll need down the road if Bedrok does grow
8. The economy is going to crap right now. Would be difficult to find any demand.
9. Destruction of western civilization. Maybe that’s dramatic, but it’s on my mind.
10. Not being able to come up with assembly lines that are able to produce a project same day.
11. Can’t figure out how to get random freelancers of the same discipline to work with each other
12. Can’t figure out how to get random freelancers in multiple disciplines to work with each other
13. There isn’t a demand for same day delivery on all size digital projects.
14. Won’t be able to expand to other disciplines because I can’t figure out how to build the assembly line there.
15. Could have problems with quality control.
16. Too many clients asking for refunds.
17. Difficult to enforce NDAs.
18. I have bad customer service because I take a long time to respond and people could get frustrated and leave.
19. Too much red tape to figure out how all the taxes comes together.

This list is by no means complete. I’m finding new things every week, and in a strange way, it’s comforting. Building bigs things in life has never been easy. Why would Bedrok be the exception? It means I’m on the right path.

Just so everything isn’t all sad, I’ll end with some reasons why Bedrok will work:

1. Fast shipping is a proven model that works for FedEx and Amazon. Why can’t it work here?
2. The value propositions are symbiotic. One works to satisfy the other.
3. The value propositions are simple. Innovation has historically been simple solutions people couldn’t see. But once it’s done, it seems so obvious.
4. Companies are increasingly choosing freelancers to do work for them.
5. The number of freelancers in the US is increasing.
6. It’s based off of the proven assembly line model from Ford. It allows for big projects to be completed same day, and it reduces the cost.
7. It’s based off Adam Smith’s principle of the division of labor. Having freelancers work on segments of a project would make them efficient at that one thing, increasing the speed of turning a project out.
8. A 0% commission marketplace would get people interested to sign up.

Side note: another benefit of being brutally honest with your idea is that people take you seriously. Self awareness is respectable.

I would prefer the first list to be longer than the second. Meaning, I would like to think more pessimistically about its success than optimistically. That’s not to say I don’t believe in the idea — I absolutely do. But I have enough respect for this problem (inconsistent freelance work) to know that my first attempt at it could fail.