About 9 years ago I created a software program called OK-Cal. It was a nutrition tracking software.

At the time, here’s what set OK-Cal apart from the competition:

1. You could tell OK-Cal your body weight goals, and OK-Cal would help you reach them. OK-Cal would give you feedback on your food choices, it would show you if your foods were helping or hurting your progress towards your goals.
2. You could tell OK-Cal what foods you wanted to eat, hit the “Go” button, and OK-Call would tell you how much you could eat of each food and still hit your goals. There are videos somewhere online showing how to hit your goals with potato chips, ice cream and protein powder or some other horrific combination. I forget, and I don’t want to look it up, because thinking about it hurts my heart.

You see I sunk over $15,000 cash into developing and promoting OK-Cal.

And I totally blew it.

Although it still hurts to think about, I believe this failure helped me in a lot of ways. It pushed me to learn much more about nutrition, and about creating and promoting products. I’ll share some of those insights with you.

I’ll also share with you one of my insights to what makes a project successful or totally blow up.

I want to share with you why I think I failed, in hopes that my mistakes may help you.

Since the year 2000 I have been borderline obsessed with nutrition and fitness and in 2007

OK-Cal was my first big venture, and I saved up a good chunk of change for a 24 year old, and invested it into trying to help out the nutrition world, and help to help myself by creating and selling a cool product.

I had big dreams about OK-Cal selling tens of thousands of copies and I poured my heart and soul into creating it.

I graduated college with an MIS degree (Management Information Systems.) And yes, I learned to code, in multiple languages. But none of the knowledge I learned in college directly applied to the real world. So I needed help with developing the software.

I had saved up about $15,000 cash. And I needed to develop a piece of software, a website, and all the marketing.

I didn’t know how to get started with the development, so I started hunting around online for website companies who also could create “cloud hosted” web apps.

I had some long conversations with a couple of companies, and it shocked me to hear both of them quote me at about $150,000. And that obviously didn’t include any marketing materials or advertising. That was already 10x over my budget.

That killed my buzz fast.

Briefly I thought of ways to finance the deal. I started coming up with a business plan, wrote one up, and quickly realized how useless that was going to be. Bottom line, I didn’t want to risk $150,000 on this project, and I didn’t even know how I’d get that money anyhow.

So, for a few months the project went on hold, until I found out about an interesting website called Elance. On Elance you could put up a project description and people would bid on the project from all around the world.

That sounded awesome, and I’d heard of people having success on Elance. So I put up my project and got about 20 bids. Most of them seemed pretty weird, broken English, some sounded like they were cut and paste responses. But almost everyone was bidding closer to the $8,000 range. Which simultaneously made me super happy, and suspicious. Especially because I was thinking, how could someone charge $150,000 and another only $8,000?

Eventually through talking with some bidders on Elance, I settled on a small company of a few people in Ukraine who agreed to develop the software for what I thought was a reasonable price.

These guys wanted to develop it as a downloadable desktop software. And thinking back on it…

I don’t think that was the best idea.

I didn’t know, but at the time phone apps were about to start exploding, and I was taking a big step back into the past with a desktop download that didn’t work on a phone. But I digress…

It was really tough to make the software, because while these guys could code the software, they needed very specific plans on the design.

If they were construction workers, and I was the architect, I still needed to create a very specific blueprint for them to follow. That wasn’t easy.

That included showing them what the user interface should look and behave like. The color scheme, the logo, all the graphics. Little icons, buttons, displays. Everything.

And that’s not all, I needed to get a database of foods, how many calories they had per ounce, gram, or approximate size (like “one medium banana”).

I also spent long nights trying to figure out an algorithm for reverse engineering how to make your chosen foods for the day hit your calorie, protein, carbohydrate and fat goals. I am not a math whiz so that took a ton of trial and error.

I also thought that it would help people even more if I wrote a book about nutrition and weight loss. So I got to work writing a book. For some reason I thought it would be pretty easy write.

But boy was I wrong.

I wanted to explain how to lose weight while eating your favorite foods, and came up with a system called “Wing It Weight Loss”. It wasn’t a huge book, but it ended up being just about 100 pages.

While the software was being created, and while I was writing the book, and creating technical documents for the software team, I was also getting a website and marketing plan built.

I hired a website designer to build out a custom website. Working with the website designer wasn’t easy, but it was super simple compared to the real work.

Because once I got my fancy looking website I realized it didn’t look fancy at all with no content on the screen. A web designer does not create content for you, just the overall look, feel, and infrastructure. And that looks extremely empty, and is totally useless without content written. The website needed words, and lots of them. Helpful content, something that told visitors what the website was about, what they could get from visiting, and how they can get it.

Creating a cohesive content strategy is extremely difficult. Because a large percent of your content needs to be geared towards telling what the value of the website is. Your content shouldn’t just be all over the place.

Basically, you need to define your marketing message and hammer that home. It is not easy to define the value of your product, and communicate that clearly, and effectively to your audience. Especially an audience who has never heard of you before. And especially in a highly skeptical market like weight loss, nutrition, or fitness in general.

I got to work on that and quickly realized I was in over my head. I knew I could do a decent job, but with all the time and money I had invested, I didn’t want to risk it. I knew that if you are super close to your own project, that can also skew your ability to see your product like a customer, and it can be best to hire an outside person to help you generate some marketing materials and ideas. Plus I was already overwhelmed. Did I mention I was also working a 9-5 job at the time?

So I hired a copywriter to create a sales page for the OK-Cal product. If you’re not familiar with the term “copywriter” it might sound like a legal term, like you are copywriting a book, or a piece of intellectual property. But in marketing, a “copywriter” is someone who writes “copy” and “copy” is basically slang for “sales in print.”

Essentially a copywriter is someone who writes sales material for products or services. They come up with a compelling angle around your product then tell the story, describe the benefits and features, and explain the offer.

That process is much more difficult than it sounds to get it right. If you get copywriting wrong, it can make a great product look bad and therefore get no sales. But if done right, it can be the thing that makes your business profitable.

I knew this, and also knew it can literally take hundreds of hours if you are not experienced. And even the most experienced copywriters can easily take months writing an effective sales message. Why? Because most of the work is done in researching the market and the product, and discovering what the market really wants, how to speak with them, what your product does differently than all the others, and how to position that to stand out in an obvious and compelling way.

And they need to do it in an interesting way that gets people’s emotions going as well. And you have to do all of this while being totally truthful about the product or service.

It’s a daunting task.

Some of the best copywriters will charge $50,000 or more for one letter, and they will usually want a percent of the total sales of your product as well. And truthfully, these people are usually worth the money.

But I didn’t have that money, and I didn’t have the time to write my own. So I went to a copywriting coach, who had students. Those students took on projects for a discount and charged about $1,500 for a letter. I decided that was my best option and I let them write my sales letter.

In the meantime, OK-Cal was finally finished, the book was done, and I was happy with the results. It wasn’t perfect, I knew it, but what product is? It worked well enough to get people the results they wanted, I felt confident in that, so it was close to time to launch this product.

Now I needed to get all the back end payment processing and product delivery in place. So I researched and hooked all that up.

Now I needed traffic.

I already burned through a bunch of cash developing this product and the supporting website, and sales materials. So I didn’t feel like I had a ton left for paid ads. Especially before I saw if it was really working or not.

So I decided to go the “free” traffic generation route. I signed up on a bunch of forums, and started posting there, with a link to my website in the bottom of my posts. And I also wrote articles to put on article directories, and other people’s blogs.

Honestly, the forum posting strategy worked, but I ended up feeling like a fraud, I didn’t like the feeling that I was posting just to get people to come back to my website. I probably shouldn’t have felt that way, but it felt forced, and not authentic, and it made me feel uncomfortable.

The article posting strategy also worked. And happily, I started to get sales. That was pretty cool! I would just sit around and another sale would come into my account without me directly doing anything. I was totally living the dream.

The sales were slowly trickling in, not anything life changing. But it inspired me enough to play with paid ads on Google. I learned all I could about Google AdWords and created some ads. Set my budget and let them run.

Shortly after, I realized that I was burning through cash with very little to show for it. If I kept this up I’d be bankrupt, and fast. So I stopped the ads and researched more about what I needed to do to make them work.

Eventually I decided to be more targeted in my ads, show to a smaller audience, and also give away a free gift in exchange for their email address. Then I would follow up with them with free and helpful information that also reminded them I have a product for sale.

That worked much better, and I was starting to get the hang of it. But it was around that time that a rash of fake blogs popped up that were all selling some magical “Acai Berry” diet.

The Acai Berry diet ads were a scam, and Google was unable to stop them. So Google eventually shut down all ads related to weight loss in their system. That meant I could no longer advertise for my product the way I wanted to.

But before everyone’s ads got shut down I did build up a decent sized email list of just over 1,000 people. My sales started going up exponentially. Nothing life changing but I had a decent amount of customers by that time.

As customers started using OK-Cal and reading the book, they became excited. And hopeful.

And this is what I didn’t anticipate…

They pinned those hopes on *me*.

I started to get emails that would pour out their heart and souls to me, exposing their struggles, their emotional battles, and their hopes and dreams for the future. They would ask “What should I do? Can you help me? ”

And I kind of freaked out.

OK… I really freaked out.

I didn’t sign up for this. I created a book and a piece of software specifically so I could solve people’s problems without ever talking to them in person, or over email. I didn’t want to interact with people, I wanted a set-it-and-forget-it passive-income model.

Instead I had people emailing me desperate for help. Some of these people seemed very emotional, and broken, and I felt really bad for them. But here I was, a 26 year old kid, burnt out from launching this product, not really thinking I’d need to interact with people. And truthfully I didn’t think I had what it took to really help them. And now I felt like I was not only NOT helping them, but I was letting them down.

I stopped responding to emails. But I still read them.

And it just sent me into a spiral of questioning myself, questioning if I should even be doing this. Questioning this product.

I thought that if the product actually worked, then people shouldn’t be asking questions, they shouldn’t be having problems, it should just do its thing and people should get results.

I felt like a fraud, I felt insecure with my product, I felt like I needed to go run and hide.

What I *now* realize is that no matter how good your product is, people will often want more. And that is exactly why many people offer coaching services, and one-on-one consultations. They offer seminars, and other things to help people expand their knowledge base. I didn’t understand that.

These people probably would have benefited from coaching, and that was a perfect opportunity to offer it to them. But… I was confused, insecure, and burnt out.

I got so freaked out that I pulled the product. I took it off the market. I stopped promoting it.

Man… that was so dumb. Now that I’m writing this out, I realize even more how dumb that was. But I did it. I pulled the product. It was gone. And I was defeated.

Classical self-sabotage. Scared of success.

I let myself-defeat sink in for a few months, and eventually put the product back up, but I made it free. And I didn’t promote it anymore. Just left it for the graveyard of failed products on the internet.

I put up an email capture in front of the product so if people wanted it they would end up on my email list, so at least I could contact them later if I ever wanted to. But… without promotion, hardly anyone came to the site anymore.  And truthfully, that’s what I wanted.

I also felt better somehow having it be free, because that meant that I didn’t need to respond to anyone’s pleas for help. It somehow absolved me of guilt and let me hide from responsibility.

All this self-doubt ended up translating to other areas of my life, I started questioning my entire approach to nutrition and started looking elsewhere.

That search caused me to go down many dysfunctional nutritional paths. Low carb, high fat, gluten-free, sugar-free, and more.

It was a long detour in my nutritional history, but now I’m glad I did it, because I found out ten times more about nutrition than I even did at the time I created OK-Cal.

What’s really strange though, is that the ideas in the book, and in OK-Cal I think are still very nutritionally sound, and I still agree with almost everything I said back then. I just have a much better understanding of why, and I also understand more details that can make an even better impact on health.

I also started studying voraciously about marketing and sales. I don’t know if I would have kept studying if OK-Cal were more of a success. Maybe I would have, but somehow the process of creating OK-Cal showed me the big picture of marketing and sales and how all the pieces have fit together.

I’ve been able to leverage this failure into a learning opportunity and have a few more actually successful online business since. Although I have had many more failures along the way.

One thing that I have finally come to terms with though, is this: OK-Cal failed because of my own insecurities. Not because of the product.

I’m starting to think more and more that success and failure is largely determined by your mindset, your emotional health, and being able to face the hidden vampires that are eating parts of your soul. Maybe the only way to vanquish those vampires is to uncover them, look them in the eye, and expose them to the light so they can dissolve into dust. And set you free.