Fruitcast was neither my first failure nor my largest. A couple years later, my co-founder and I sank a million dollars into a website-hosting marketplace, which we never bothered to release. But, following these were the successes of Crazy Egg and KISSmetrics.

As a founder or a product leader, you will fail a lot. The only way to cope with it is to make those failures mean something, and the only way to achieve that is by continuously improving. If you build a system around product development that is truly focused on learning, then controlled failures all become assets that you can turn into a competitive advantage. This doesn't guarantee that your product will see traction, and take off-but the alternative is to rely on dumb luck.