Immotionar post mortem: how to recover psychologically from your VR startup failure

In this third episode relative to my startup failure (first one was the failure announcement, while the second one talked about the errors we made that led to our failure), I want to tell you how you, as a startup founder, can help yourself in recovering psychologically from your startup failure.

Seeing your startup failing is fucking hard, trust me. It’s like losing a person you love. When you start your startup adventure, you know that you have 90% chances of failing (these are the startups statistics), but you think that this won’t regard you, since your startup is based on a great idea and you’re super-determined to work to make it become a great success. When things become hard, you keep pushing and you continue think that they’ll get better in the end. You don’t realize it is failed until the moment of the final shut-down decision.

Immotionar post mortem: what errors we made in our VR startup and how to avoid them for yours

In my last post I told you that my startup has just shut down. If you don’t know it, its name was Immotionar: our purpose was to offer full body virtual reality to every kind of headsets, mixing VR HMD with body tracking sensors like Microsoft Kinects. An innovative product, that has failed nonetheless.

With today’s post I want to highlight some errors we made, so that you can avoid them in your startup journey (if you plan in becoming an entrepreneur).

So, this is a list of the main keypoints I want to higlight.

The greatest part of being a startupper is having supporters

Today I just want to talk about some thoughts that came to my mind after I had a call with our supporter and beta-tester Sasha. It has happened last thursday: I was really tired, stressed, late for everything and I had to have a call with him to talk about our ImmotionRoom system and what was wrong with it. During the call I had to help him with the setup and listen to his feedbacks to all the problems our product has inside… but the thing that I loved a lot was seeing his support, the fact that he truly wants us to succeed, he truly believes in us. And we have no idea of who he is: he’s not a relative of ours, neither a friend (well, now he actually is, but he was not before he discovered our company), he’s not even from our same continent! He’s just a man that believes in us, in what we do and started supporting us. And he’s doing it in a great way… like giving me this great moment during our Skype call…

One strategy to overcome difficulties in your startup journey

Some times ago I wrote a review about our participation at the European Innovation Academy, one of the most important accelerator here in Turin, Italy.
There is a point of that review that I want to highlight. I can summarize that point with this sentence:

Whatever happens, go to sleep as a loser and wake up as a champion.

What do I mean? Well, shit happens. And shit happens even more when you try to make something new and difficult, when you start some journey to change your life, like opening your startup, begin travelling, trying to change yourself. The highest the reward, the highest difficulties you have to face. Because as doctor Kelso says in Scrubs (if you don’t like Scrubs… well, how can you ever think of succeeding in life?)