For many, failure is a kick in the gut that is hard to recover from. But the creators of the now wildly famous website, Reddit, took failure and used it to spur them on.
Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman began Reddit in October of 2006 out of a tiny apartment in Boston. Only 3 months later, they received a call to meet with an executive for Yahoo! The two were obviously surprised and thrilled. Who would have thought their small start up would garner the attention of anyone so soon, let alone Yahoo!
So off they went to meet with the executive. The meeting began with the pair explaining what Reddit is and how it works. When asked how much traffic they were getting to their site, they responded that they were getting around 10 or 11,000 visitors. The executive’s response?
“You guys are a rounding error compared to Yahoo! What are you doing here?”
The two used this harsh criticism to embolden them. Now, Reddit is massive, with roughly 114.5 million visitors each month. You can use failure to succeed!