Building Entrepreneurial Lessons

PushSocialing: IoT, social media, and the lessons only failure teaches

THE CONTEXT

In 2012, I co-founded a startup called PushSocialing, building IoT tools to help small businesses grow and measure their presence through the early social media ecosystem to compete through uncertain economic times and real digital shifts that small and medium businesses were not ready for.

The instinct was right. The relationship between businesses and digital tools was entering a period of constant reinvention, and we saw it early. What we did not yet understand was how to build an organization that could move fast enough to meet the entrepreneurial climate.

WHERE IT BROKE DOWN

We held too tightly. We were not willing to bring in people we did not yet fully trust, even when they carried experience and skills we clearly lacked, especially from a financial and strategic perspective. We treated the venture as a long-term possibility to grow into, rather than as a first experiment to learn from fast and rebuild.

It did not survive past two years.

WHAT IT GAVE ME

Cross-functional leadership

Building something lean under pressure, without the right team structure, made clear what cross-functional leadership actually requires. You cannot hold it all. You have to distribute trust before you feel ready.

The discipline to iterate

We protected the idea instead of letting the product and service organically tell us where it needed to go. The lesson was irreversible: a first venture is not a long-term commitment but a school for grit, perseverance, and understanding. The faster you iterate, the more you preserve.

Resilience as a design principle

Failure, when you stay accountable to it, is one of the few experiences that permanently changes how you build. It taught me to follow my instinct, stay true to my voice, and charge forward, even with fear and before I am ready or certain, finding the courage to get through it.

Trust as a leadership tool

The hardest thing I learned was that trust has many definitions, and business savvy requires a kind of trust in engagement that, before it is fully earned and despite its risk, is necessary to build at scale and to make a vision a reality when you don’t have all the resources. It is a trust in yourself and the types of relationships that you build along the way.

THE LESSON

Failure, when you stay accountable to it, does not end the story; if anything, it feeds everything built after it with a better understanding of risk, more trust, more speed, and a much clearer sense of what it actually takes.