Do you believe in fail fast and fail quickly?

The first month of 2021 is a bad month to begin with, I always say to myself that we need to fail fast and fail quickly, but failing is not a pleasant experience.

In November we started developing a health information management system (HIMS) for a laboratory service. Which will computerise their already paper based POS, reporting, patient registering system.

Me and my co founder was easterly working on the project for the last 2 months. We had thought we had everything we needed to nail this project.

• We had to knowledge about the domain, and we knew what are the problems faced by the people in the health industry
• We had negotiated with a client, so we had a customer
• And there was product market fit for a solution like this, with both health institutes and us benefiting by the service

We quickly made a MVP, did some internal testing and it was working alright. Then we wanted to implement a parallel testing with the institute, with their current paper based system, and our cloud based system running in parallel to so we can get an idea on how we can improve our MVP.

However, when I tried to reach out to the client about implementing our service in parallel with their own paper based system, they were not interested on a computerised system anymore.

I don’t understand what changed their minds, maybe due to the pandemic their income might have reduced, which might have made them think twice about an investment. Maybe they are happy with their current paper based solution, and don’t see the value of a modern computer based system.

Even though no matter how much I believe that the benefit they gain from replacing a paper based system will not do anything, unless the clients can’t see the benefit and can’t be convinced.

Either way, me and my partner have two options,

• Look for a potential new candidate who is interested in using the system
• Terminate the project and think about starting something new

I will try to find potential customers who will be interested in a similar system until the end of the month, however if I was unable to find a suitable client, I might have to terminate the project and start something fresh.

Maybe failing fast and filing quickly has its benefits because, if we would have put more time and effort in creating the perfect solution, a rejection like this would have wasted lot of our time and effort.

What would you do if you are in my situation? Do you believe in fail fast and fail quickly?