Behind every polished business success lies a collection of uncertain decisions, abandoned projects, and expensive lessons. How to Fail: I Got Really Fucking Good at It by Robert Strode brings those experiences into full view through a story that’s honest, funny, painful, and refreshingly human.
When Survival Becomes Persistence
Long before entrepreneurship entered his life, Robert faced challenges that demanded resilience. His early years were shaped by instability, homelessness, drugs, gangs, and time spent on the streets. These experiences gave him an unusual relationship with failure. A setback could hurt, yet it rarely felt permanent.
Robert eventually moved into a regular job and discovered the possibility of earning money online around 2014. The internet offered an open door. Websites could attract customers, niche ideas could generate income, and an ordinary person could build something valuable from a laptop.
His first significant breakthrough came from an unexpected subject: chicken coops. A niche website grew into a thriving business and generated more than $200,000 in sales. Robert later sold it, gaining proof that online entrepreneurship could deliver real results.
That early win sparked years of experimentation. He explored Fortnite dropshipping, social apps, cryptocurrency, meme coins, marketplaces, mobile apps, AI concepts, and websites that struggled to attract attention. Money disappeared. Launches fell flat. Platform restrictions created new problems, while customer interest sometimes vanished before a project had a chance to grow.
Each idea carried excitement at the beginning. Some offered small victories. Others became costly reminders that enthusiasm alone rarely creates demand.
The Stories Business Gurus Usually Skip
Many entrepreneurial books arrive after the author has achieved wealth, recognition, or a dramatic exit. Robert shares his journey while the outcome is still unfolding. He’s inside the struggle, opening the laptop, studying another opportunity, and wondering whether the next attempt could finally take off.
That unfinished perspective gives How to Fail its distinctive character. Readers experience the awkward reality of building businesses through his eyes. They encounter wasted budgets, technical headaches, poorly timed launches, burnout, overconfidence, and ideas that sounded far better in theory.
Robert’s storytelling carries humor through difficult moments. He openly examines his decisions without dressing every mistake as a carefully planned step toward greatness. His failures remain messy. The lessons feel practical because they came with genuine emotional and financial consequences.
A central message emerges from these experiences: creating something is often easier than persuading people to care about it. Founders can become attached to an idea, spend months developing it, and discover too late that customers feel little urgency to use it.
Robert encourages entrepreneurs to validate earlier. They can question assumptions, speak with potential users, examine real demand, and test the weakest parts of an idea before investing heavily. Failure still carries value, though it becomes far more useful when someone studies what caused it.
This philosophy also appears in Marketur, Robert’s free business idea pressure-testing tool. It helps founders challenge their concepts before committing substantial time and money. The project transforms hard-earned experience into a practical resource for other builders.
The journey eventually returns to chicken coops, bringing Robert back to familiar ground. This full-circle moment shows how an old idea can look different after years of experimentation. Experience changes the builder, even when the subject remains the same.
About the Author
Robert is an entrepreneur, creator, and online business builder with more than a decade of experience testing ideas across numerous digital industries. His projects have included content websites, e-commerce stores, apps, marketplaces, cryptocurrency ventures, and AI-powered tools.
His background gives his writing emotional depth. Robert understands instability, reinvention, and the exhausting work of rebuilding after disappointment. He writes for startup founders, indie hackers, side-hustlers, creators, and anyone who has watched a promising plan collapse.
His voice is direct, profane, and personal. Readers receive stories from someone who has earned money, lost money, sold a business, chased trends, made poor calls, and continued creating anyway.
Why This Story Matters
Available on Amazon, How to Fail: I Got Really Fucking Good at It offers a grounded account of entrepreneurship without a secret formula or glamorous finish line. It reminds readers that persistence grows through action, reflection, and the willingness to begin again.
Robert’s story remains in motion. That’s exactly what makes it powerful. He keeps learning from the past, testing the next possibility, and asking the question familiar to every determined builder: What if this one works?
We had the privilege of interviewing Robert Strode. Here are excerpts from the interview:
Hi, thank you so much for joining us today! Please introduce yourself and tell us what you do.
My name is Robert Strode. I’m an entrepreneur, builder, and author of How to Fail: I Got Really Fucking Good at It. I’ve spent more than a decade building online businesses, websites, apps, AI tools, and plenty of ideas that didn’t work. Today I’m still building, including Marketur, a free tool that pressure-tests business ideas before people spend serious time and money on them. I’m not a business guru. I’m just someone who has succeeded at a few things and gotten my ass kicked by plenty of others.
Please share your journey with our readers.
My story started long before business. I came from a difficult childhood involving chaos, homelessness, drugs, and the streets. Around 2014, I started seriously building businesses online. One of my early niche businesses generated more than $200,000 in sales before I sold it. But the next decade wasn’t a straight line upward. I tried websites, dropshipping, marketplaces, crypto, apps, AI projects, and countless other ideas. I made money, lost money, built things nobody cared about, depended on platforms, overcomplicated simple ideas, and started over repeatedly. Eventually I realized the failures were the most interesting part of the story. That became How to Fail.
What are the strategies that helped you become successful in your journey?
I don’t consider myself a traditional success story, and that’s the point. Persistence has probably mattered most. I learned how to get hit, figure out what happened, and try again. My biggest lesson has been that building isn’t always the hard part. Getting people to care is. For years, when something wasn’t working, I thought another feature would fix it. Now I try to build leaner, validate earlier, question my assumptions, talk to real people, and focus more on distribution.
Any message for our readers?
Don’t surround yourself with people who tell you every idea is amazing. Find reasons it might fail. Test your assumptions. Try to prove yourself wrong before the market does it for you. And if you fail anyway? Learn something expensive and use the damn lesson.
Thank you so much, Robert, for giving us your precious time! We wish you all the best for your journey ahead!
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