During my last semester at the University of Michigan Stephen M. Ross School of Business, I took a class titled “New Venture Creation”. The premise of the class was that over the course of 14 weeks, students would build an entire start-up company from the ground up. To be clear, we didn’t actually have to launch the business (although some groups did) but rather do all of the work prior to launch. This involved building a financial model, creating a marketing plan and developing a launch timeline. While this was certainly an excellent activity (and one of my favorite classes), the course ultimately fell short in perhaps the biggest endeavor that entrepreneurs face—developing the product. Our professor, a career entrepreneur who built several companies, did offer one very important piece of advice about building your product—fail fast.

This mantra of the entrepreneur—fail fast—seems like odd advice at first (who wants to fail?) but when you look a bit closer it makes a lot of sense. Nothing is perfected in one try and so the faster you get a product to market, the quicker you learn how to improve it. Of course this advice doesn’t just apply to starting a business, but applies to anything new that we attempt to create.

For the month of July, the Challenge Detroit fellows were asked to create their own challenge to tackle. Having similar experiences with sports in our own lives while we were young, four of us teamed up to create an event to introduce the youth of Detroit to obtaining personal growth through sports. We all felt that athletics helps develop important life skills such as persistence, goal setting and positive attitudes. Thus the Detroit Youth Games was born.

The Inaugural Detroit Youth Games

Let me stop right here for a moment to say that I in no way think that the inaugural Detroit Youth Games was a failure. Indeed, my partners and I accomplished everything we set out to do with our event.  We organized an event at the new Belle Isle basketball courts in under 4 weeks that taught participants basic skills for basketball, football and soccer. After the drills, we held workshops that taught participants about goal setting and creative thinking. We even recruited Olympic gold medalist Peter Vanderkaay to speak to our participants (thanks Peter!). Finally, the kids participated in a relay-style challenge showing off their newfound skills to determine the winner of the first Detroit Youth Games.

Our biggest failing with the event was in marketing. We had originally planned to cap the event at 100 participants. After a weeklong social media campaign and an online signup form, we had zero participants registered. Upon asking for feedback from a few parents, we learned that we committed a very common mistake—forgetting who our consumers were. The parents told us that internet access was frequently not stable for children in the neighborhoods that we were targeting. Furthermore, parents don’t trust Facebook events as something they would send their kids to. With this information, we tried to reach out to make personal contact with parents using our own networks and by handing out flyers on the Detroit Riverfront.

Although our turnout was only four brave young girls, they participated fully in the day and all took something home with them—a sports ball to commemorate the day, a career goal (our participants were a future doctor, police officer, veterinarian and the first female NFL player) and a plan to get there.

Failing fast is exactly what we did with our marketing for the event, but now we know how to better reach participants for next year. No matter how much our annual event grows over the next few years, I will always remember this inaugural year as a tremendous success for the difference we were able to make in the lives of our four brave girls.