SoDunked! is 1 year old! -- Success and failure

Our first app, SoDunked!, appeared in the app store exactly one year ago today. It seems like a good time to reflect on the year past as well as look forward to the year ahead. Lyle and I put our heads together and wrote quite a bit on this, so we will publish our reflections in installments over the next few weeks.

Since last December, we have attracted over 3,600 Facebook fans--from 19 countries and all continents except Antarctica, nearly 13,000 Twitter followers, over 4,000 "Journey to an App" pageviews from 10 countries, and, well, less sales than we thought we would have by now. By different measures we are both a success and a failure. We have had success at selling to people in dozens of countries, at using social media, at building a following, at getting the message out to a lot of people. We have failed to get it out to enough people and at getting enough of those people to buy. I also think we have failed to use our circle of experts to help us with decision-making and strategy as much as we could have this year.

According to scholars of entrepreneurship, failure is important--critical in fact--so I am thinking that failing at some of our goals is one of our successes. Okay, bear with me here. If we had sold as many apps as we had hoped by now, we might have relaxed a bit too soon, burned out quickly, or learned only that we were lucky. (Okay, we'd have earned more money at this, but I digress.) By not reaching those sales goals, we have to pay attention, experiment, try new things, find workarounds, and continue to brainstorm instead of saying "well, we got it right, no changes needed." We know what we would do differently next time and we apply what we have learned as we try the next approach to our current (SoDunked!) venture.

For an interesting article about entrepreneurial  failure (and success), read this article by Michael Hennigan at FinFacts in Ireland. Or, read this blog post from Brad Feld at Feldthoughts.

We hope all of your app developers find success at this. And, please, please, please, send SoDunked! as a gift to some 4-9 year old kids' parents today!