In the summer of 2008, you could say I got lucky with Taylor Swift.
At the time, Taylor Swift was an 18-year-old country music star who was rising in popularity. I was the 30-year-old co-founder and CEO of a promising music-technology startup. Earlier that year, we had launched Bandbox, an innovative e-commerce platform that allowed artists to sell their music directly to fans. Our first client was Jewel and our second was Taylor.
I still vividly remember the day it happened. A couple months prior to the official release of Taylor’s second album, Fearless, her record label decided to pre-sell her new music before making it available at Walmart, Target, iTunes and other retailers. In order to pull it off, they decided to partner with us, using Bandbox’s embeddable store & shopping cart widget on all Taylor’s websites, fan club sites, social networks and blogs.
That day was surreal. I imagine it’s the same feeling people get when they hit the jackpot in Las Vegas. I remember exactly where I was. I was sitting on a brown sofa in a local Nashville coffee shop. My laptop open, I anxiously awaited what would happen once Taylor’s team pulled the trigger. And then they did. And the sales poured in. In a few minutes, we sold more than a thousand dollars worth of product. In a few hours, tens of thousands of dollars.
Over the next 24 hours, so much money came through our system that PayPal (whose technology we were using to process the backend credit card transactions) shut us down. After several frantic hours talking with their security and fraud departments, we were back up and running. They later told us they’d never seen a new company process so much money in such a short time and suspected we were an illegal operation laundering money. Over the next few weeks, we would sell multiple six figures worth of music, merchandise and other special Taylor Swift items. Overnight, we hit it big.
It seemed as if Bandbox might be the next big thing in the tech and music world. Taylor opened the door to endless opportunities. Artists were signing up left and right. Advertisers were paying us handsomely. Investors were eager to write us checks. We felt like the luckiest guys in the world. Almost too lucky. And unfortunately, we were.
Little did we know, the American economy was about to take the biggest crash it had seen since the Great Depression. Not many people saw it coming and we definitely didn’t. All we could see was certain success, but we had a rude awakening coming our way. While we were rapidly growing, our revenues weren’t keeping up with the growing expenses of our ever-expanding team. We weren’t worried, but we should have been.
In late October of 2008, just a few short months after our initial success with Taylor, our good fortune took a turn for the worse. Investors wouldn’t call us back. We started running out of money. The other founders and I stopped taking paychecks. We had to let go of valuable team members. And over the next few years, things got ugly. Real ugly. I might share the details another time, but suffice it to say, it didn’t end like it started. In 2011, we sold Bandbox for pennies on the dollar. I’d lost everything. As did my partners. As did our investors. We didn’t feel so lucky anymore.
Here are three things I learned from Taylor Swift about getting lucky:
1. Irrational Thinking - Getting lucky undermines the value of logic, data and statistical facts. It causes you to think and act irrationally. Anyone who wins the lottery no longer cares that statistically they only had a one in a couple hundred millionths of a chance to win. People who buy lottery tickets believe there’s a supernatural force at play that could enable them to overcome all odds. Hitting it big early on as an entrepreneur has a similar effect. Luck provides a false sense of hope and optimism. You begin to dismiss reality and make bold, audacious decisions based on little more than delusional thinking.
2. Unrealistic Expectations - Getting lucky sets us up for unrealistic expectations. The definition of luck is having success brought on by chance rather than one's own actions. Put another way, the positive things that happened to us really had little to do with us. It wasn’t because of our intellect or hard work - it was simply by chance and working with the right artist at the right time. When we get lucky, we’re fooled into thinking we’ll continue to be lucky. We expect the same type of results to continue. Our expectations simply become unrealistic.
3. Loss of Focus - Getting lucky can also bring many short-term successes and opportunities that end up distracting us from our long-term vision and what’s really important. We wind up going different directions, chasing bunny trails and losing sight of our original destination. And before we know it, this loss of focus can become our demise.
So, what if I had a do-over? Would I seriously turn down the opportunity to work with Taylor Swift? Even now, I’m a little hesitant to say no. There’s still a piece of me that thinks maybe there would be a way to say yes and simply be smarter next time. Maybe if I could avoid any irrational thinking, unrealistic expectations and a loss of focus. Then again, I suppose that’s the same irrational thinking that got me in trouble in the first place.
The reality is that getting lucky early on in the life of your business or early in your career is the worst thing that could ever happen to you. Trust me. So, what should you do the next time a crazy good opportunity falls on your lap? I’ll leave that up to you to decide. But proceed with caution. And I wish you the best of luck.
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Brian Peterson is the Founder & Executive Director of Curiosity Co., a product strategy and research consultancy based in Boulder, CO. Brian is the thought-leader behind the WhatNext framework, a decision-making process that helps executive leaders figure out what’s next for their organizations. Originally from San Diego, CA, Brian spent 15 years in Nashville, TN, working with some of the world’s largest music companies to figure out their what next during the height of the digital music revolution. Brian now lives in Boulder, CO, with his wife and 3 kids, consults, speaks on, writes about, researches, and otherwise obsesses over this one single topic of “what next.”
