In November 2005, my co-founder Neil Patel and I launched a
podcast advertising network called Fruitcast. We didn't know a
thing about podcasting, but we did think it made sense that there
should be a marketplace like AdWords for the web for companies to
get their ads into podcasts.

We outsourced development to a dev shop and had it built in around two months for $45,000. When Michael Arrington wrote about it for Techcrunch, he pointed out one fatal flaw in our product:

It looks like they are paying out on a per-download basis, and
the site suggests that podcasters can expect to receive $0.25 per
listener. That's a hefty $250 CPM to the advertiser… which is way
above what radio stations charge for ads.

Wow, we had no clue. We didn't know anything about radio
stations, or podcasts, or advertising. We were shooting blind.

Around a year after launch, we shut down Fruitcast for good. One of the developers who worked on the project wrote a line in an email that said, "I was sincerely hoping we'd find some magical combination of events to jump start."

There were a lot of reasons why Fruitcast failed, but that was the big one. A lot of companies never find product-market fit, fizzle out, and die-and that's fine.

Where we really kicked ourselves was that-against everything we knew about how to build product-we fell into that trap of being so assured that we had a great idea that we never went out to learn everything we needed to. Without this, we were unable to translate a great idea into a product with product-market fit.

That's why building a habit of continuous learning and improvement is one of the most important things your product organization can do-because it counterbalances your ego and fear of being wrong and looking stupid.

Don't ship sh!t. Ship products that people want. Here's how.