Hindsight Bias and Getting Back Up on the Horse

As the businessmen and women who came to class to speak told us, entrepreneurship is all about learning from your mistakes and getting back up on the horse when you fall. Staying positive in the face of adversity and failure is key to be being successful. You have to spend a lot of time being bad at something to eventually become good at it, and the trades of business are no different. The $200 project was full of bad experiences and lessons to be learned for the next time, and as it came to a close this week I came to terms with what I needed to do better in the future.

Going into this week I was feeling an amount pressure and stress unlike that of any other project I have done in school. Several factors, including owing someone actually money and having to get people to give me money so that the project was to be successful, lead to this. We tried several times over the first three days of this final week to sell the water bottles, that no one seemed to want, to no avail. Our contacts on the sports teams wanted nothing to do with us and my idea for contacting the athletic administration was leading to dead ends. When a classmate and I tried to sell outside a basketball game on Wednesday afternoon, one of the trainers who works with Alex laughed in my face as he told me there was no reason they would buy our inferior and more expensive bottles. With the deadline looming and an authority figure actually laughing in my face, I went home from the sales attempt in a mildly sized pit of despair.

Our last hope was Thursdays E-block, a ninety-minute stretch that three of our members had free. These students reserved a table and posted up outside of the cafeteria over the course of both lunches to make our final stand. The evidence from all of the other attempts in the weeks prior would lead one to believe that this would end like all the others, in failure. I was preoccupied ushering the MLK assembly and attending class, but around half way through the block I recieved a text that made me jump out of my seat. Apparently, by docking the price to $5, we were able to break even in under 40 minutes. I guess a good price is just too good for Brookline kids to pass up on, no matter the quality or need for a product.  

Although this saving grace pulled us from the flames at the last moment, it would not be wise to bank on such a thing happening again in the future. Out execution of this project was messy from the moment it began up until its end. I learned about the dire and otherwise obvious need for market research before making an investment. We ultimately bought a product that very few people actually needed or wanted at its full price. If we had put more time and thought into understanding what people wanted and then designing a product from there, we would have had a much easier time. Secondly, my experiences as the team leader for this project have given me a better understanding of when to take the reigns and when to let your workers use their own intuition. Last week when we were wasting time making a useless flyer, I should have stepped in. But this Thursday when the team made an executive decision to lower the prices in the moment without telling me, it was definitely the best idea available. Intervening with the team’s entrepreneurial instincts in this moment would have lead to failure. Overall this project gave me plenty of headaches, but has also sharpened my acumen and made me pumped for the next opportunity to prove myself.