Entrepreneurship can look glamorous once the difficult years have been reduced to a few inspiring stories. How to Fail: I Got Really Fucking Good at It by Robert Strode stays close to the chaos, capturing the failed launches, drained accounts, stubborn optimism, and strange ideas that shape a builder’s real journey.
Before the Success Story
Robert’s determination has roots far beyond business. His childhood involved instability, homelessness, drugs, gangs, and the streets. Life taught him how quickly circumstances could change and how survival sometimes depended on moving forward without a clear map.
Years later, a regular job brought stability, while the internet introduced a new obsession. Around 2014, Robert began exploring ways to make money online. Digital entrepreneurship offered endless possibilities. A simple website could reach customers across the country, and a niche subject could become the foundation of a profitable company.
Chicken coops became his first major opportunity. Robert created a website around them, attracted buyers, and generated more than $200,000 in sales. He eventually sold the business. The experience confirmed that an online idea could produce serious revenue, especially when the product, audience, and timing aligned.
That achievement opened the door to a long series of new experiments. Robert tried Fortnite dropshipping, marketplaces, cryptocurrency, meme coins, social platforms, mobile apps, AI projects, and websites aimed at audiences who showed little interest. Some concepts collapsed quickly. Others required months of effort before revealing their weaknesses.
Money was lost. Energy ran low. Technical obstacles appeared at the worst moments. Still, another idea always seemed to be waiting nearby.
What Failure Looks Like Up Close
The book places readers inside the daily reality of entrepreneurship. Robert describes the excitement of discovering an idea, the rush of building it, and the uncertainty that arrives when customers remain silent. These moments rarely appear in motivational clips, yet they’re familiar to founders everywhere.
His account has no polished formula. Robert shares poor decisions, wasted spending, bad timing, platform dependence, and the habit of building too much before checking whether anyone wants the finished product. He also captures smaller victories, including early sales, signs of interest, and brief moments when a risky plan begins to feel brilliant.
Humor keeps the story moving. Robert’s voice is candid and profane, allowing difficult experiences to feel approachable. He recognizes the absurdity of repeatedly investing hope in uncertain ventures. He also understands why entrepreneurs keep doing it. Every new project carries the possibility of becoming the one that finally succeeds.
A major lesson concerns validation. Founders often enjoy creating products because progress feels visible. Customer demand is harder to measure, and assumptions can survive for months when nobody challenges them. Robert’s journey shows the value of testing an idea while it’s still small.
Entrepreneurs can speak with potential users, study existing buying behavior, and identify the riskiest belief behind a concept. Early feedback can expose weak demand before development becomes expensive. It can also reveal a stronger direction that the founder had overlooked.
Robert brought this lesson into Marketur, a free tool created to pressure-test business ideas. It encourages entrepreneurs to examine their assumptions before spending heavily. The tool reflects years of practical experience gathered through profitable ventures, disappointing launches, and projects that simply went nowhere.
Eventually, his path leads back to chicken coops. Returning to a familiar niche adds a satisfying layer to the story. Robert approaches it with years of additional knowledge, sharper instincts, and a deeper understanding of what can go wrong.
About the Author
Robert is an entrepreneur and digital business builder whose work spans websites, e-commerce, marketplaces, apps, cryptocurrency, and artificial intelligence. Over more than a decade, he has earned revenue, sold a business, lost money, followed trends, and restarted after numerous setbacks.
His personal history gives the book its emotional foundation. Robert writes as someone who has faced uncertainty in life and business, making his perspective relevant to founders, indie hackers, creators, online sellers, and side-hustlers. His experiences also speak to anyone who has failed publicly or privately and wondered whether trying again would be worthwhile.
The Next Idea Awaits
Available on Amazon, How to Fail: I Got Really Fucking Good at It shows how entrepreneurship feels when the ending remains unwritten. It offers hard-earned lessons, uncomfortable honesty, and reassurance for readers whose plans have fallen apart.
Robert keeps building because possibility still matters. After every expensive mistake and unexpected detour, he returns to the laptop with more experience and one enduring thought: perhaps the next idea will work.
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!
