I listened to an interesting podcast today. Good ol' Scoble. He
was
talking to an IBM engineer about marketing.
One of the big ideas was to not be afraid to fail. He was
talking about old-media marketers who would spend a lot of money
(TV ads, big print media runs) and because of the large risk, you
had to be somewhat safe or you'd get in trouble (or fired). On the
web, marketing is a lot easier to change and costs a lot less. His
point is that you can take risks and fail because the world won't
come crashing down when you do. You can fix a failure: so fail and
listen and get it right.
Reminds me of
John C. Maxwell's "Fail Forward" idea (disclosure: I haven't
read the book, I've gotten the concept second-hand).
I think you need to fail fast. Try something, find out if it
works, and if you fail, do it fast so you can try the next
thing.