Lately there’s been a large buzz around the coolness of “Failure”.  As cliché as as it may be, there is truth to finding success from failure.  Recently, hundreds of people attended a full conference dedicated to the subject. FAILcon.

The conference’s focus was on the ability to quick learn from failure, recover, and iterate.  With a new venture, you’re taking a risk and you’re very likely to encounter failures.  How quickly you recover and iterate through the failures will determine your success.

Max Levchin, of PayPal & Slide, and Mark Pinkus, of Zynga, shared how their frequent and early failures helped pave the way for their eventual success. Mark discussed how when he failed, his best plan was to step back, figure out how to salvage the decision, and move on.

Max spoke about one of his early failures; a company that was going to launch the first banner ad network. His fatal mistake? He spent 9 months developing the “perfect” calendaring application (crucial for scheduling ads). He said he could have done it less time or used an off the shelf option, but he decided to develop it himself.  These additional months of unnecessary development gave Doubleclick time to launch.  The rest is history. His advice? Determine what features are crucial to your service and spend the right amount of time on them.

At Recurly, we do one thing and one thing well: handle subscription billing from end to end so your developers can focus on more important tasks.  Building a custom subscription billing system can easily become that 9 month project that distracts your engineering team from developing your product.

We’re in private beta. If you’re looking for a subscription billing service, let us help you.  Please signup at http://recurly.com