The Font Awesome Museum of Failure

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If you had a 1.4 chance of succeeding in something you really cared about, would you still do it? Well, Font Awesome founders Dave Gandy and Travis Chase did actually dive right into the abyss of that 1.4 success rate, uh, back when they applied to Y Combinator in 2014. And since that time, Font Awesome has had plenty of failures, just like any company does.

But you know what they say, if you're not failing, then you're not learning.

And yes, I admit that sounds like it's taken directly from a motivational poster, the kind that's usually bolted to a wall next to a kitten hanging off a branch that says, "Hang in there." Uh, but cliches are cliches for a reason, And there is truth to them, and here at Font Awesome, we're voracious learners and [00:01:00] failures for that matter.

Um, so maybe the rub is do you have the freedom to fail? And if you do, what are you learning?

So recently I was perusing some of Podcast Awesome's episode themes, and I started to notice that, uh, we're really pretty candid about our missteps, and we really aim to have a good sense of humor about it. So a case in point would be Font Awesome founder's own Dave Gandy. He flunked out of MIT, actually twice.

but he got back in both times, and he finally finished on that third and last shot at it. So today I thought we'd go back in time to some previous episodes and interact with them just a little bit. And what really sparked this episode idea was coming across a funny site about a real place called The Museum of Failure, which started as a single exhibit in Helsingborg, Sweden in [00:02:00] 2017, and it's curated by Samuel West.

 And since then it's toured as pop-ups in places like LA, Washington, D.C., and New York. A great feature of the museum is there are these oddball experiments that flop spectacularly with consumers. Here's a good one. Take for instance Colgate Lasagna. Now, I'm 100% on board with cheesy pasta, and I'm also a big fan of dental hygiene.

But putting them together for a single experience, not so much. But before we get into some of the amazing exhibits at the Museum of Failures and what those exhibits can teach us, we'll bring it closer to home from a previous episode [00:03:00] of Podcast Awesome where I was chatting with Dave about the misstep of launching Fort Awesome.

 Notice the subtle change there? Not Font Awesome, Font Awesome, but Fort Awesome. Uh, that could be a little confusing, don't you think?

 Exhibit A, Dave Gandy, MIT, and the failed side projects.

Here are a few segments from Dave that help to frame up some of these failed experiments at Font Awesome. 

And this is from the episode When Failure Isn't Failure: Hard Lessons in Business and Life with Dave Gandy, which is, uh, from back in June 2023

A startup is nothing more than believing a lie long enough that it becomes the truth, right? That your company has something that people want and that you can make enough money off of it to survive. That in a way when it starts, that's a lie. Uh, it doesn't exist yet, or you, you hope it [00:04:00] does

If we're only ever succeeding in life, that means that we're never trying anything hard enough- Right ... that truly challenges us. It's actually only in failure that we find out where some of those real limitations are

So here's the basic gist. Font Awesome was already up and running with enough traffic that Dave describes it as so many visitors. 

There were already plenty of eyeballs on Font Awesome, enough that we could point them toward a new product. So Font Awesome started running quarterly experiments trying to convert that existing audience into a paid product

the first product was Fort Awesome, meant to help with all of a site's front-end assets, not just icons

 See, the similarity wasn't just an awkward coincidence. It created real confusion for customers trying to tell the two apart, which is part of why the product struggled. And in the next quarter, they tried another experiment, Font Awesome CDN, a simple hosted [00:05:00] link people could drop into their sites for free.

The plan was to use it as a funnel to get people on the free CDN, then convert them into paying Font Awesome customers, and that conversion barely happened

After a full quarter of work, exactly one person converted So after a quarter's work for four people, three months for four people, we had one person- Hmm ... sign up that way. Oh, geez. One.

So both quarters, by Dave's own definition, it looked like a failure at the time. Even though both these experiments seemed like a failure, there was a surprising byproduct that emerged. Running the CDN meant collecting email addresses from everyone who used it, even the ones who never converted. That leftover list, the one visible byproduct of two quarters that felt otherwise like a bust, is what gave them a sizable ready audience when they later launched the [00:06:00] record-breaking Kickstarter.

So the thing that originally looked like the failure's only sad souvenir that was left over turned out to be the stuff that the actual win ran on. that's the product side of it, but Dave takes the same idea somewhere more personal too. Remember I mentioned in the intro at the top of the episode that Dave flunked out of MIT.

So here's him talking about it directly. 

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And this brings us to the insights the Museum of Failure has gifted the world, and man, I'm sure glad that they did because there's some failed products that are pretty funny and well worth a mention here. So remember that Colgate lasagna joke I made at the opening of the show? Uh, it does get a little bit complicated.

First up is the Colgate Kitchen. You know Colgate, the brand that's, it's basically on every bathroom sink in America in the form of [00:08:00] toothpaste probably. in 1964, Colgate test marketed a frozen food line called Colgate Kitchen. Dried chicken and crab meat entrees.

Ugh. 

Colgate tried this product line out at a plant in Madison, Wisconsin, but it pulled it from the manufacturing really quick. these are facts that are solidly documented from two independent nineteen sixty-six trade sources. The bummer news, at least from my side, uh, it's a bummer because the Colgate beef lasagna image that's all over the internet, including on the Museum of Failure's own site, it turns out it's probably mostly fabricated reconstruction.

Uh, in fact, their own curator has said he created the packaging from online sources, and Colgate's legal team has denied any record of a lasagna product existing. I mean, from, from my point of view, it's kinda too bad [00:09:00] because a product that seems to suggest you can eat and brush your teeth all at the same time is pretty amazing.

But, uh, one thing about this branding mashup though is think about, I mean, just think about how gross certain foods are right after brushing your teeth, you know? Uh, orange juice and toothpaste, uh, Oreos and toothpaste. Teeth brushing and eating don't, uh, they don't really go hand in hand, 

I'd love to be a fly on the wall to see how these product lines were pitched. Okay, so next up is Harley Davidson cologne. Now, what would a tough motorcycle guy or gal, what would they wanna smell like? Well, I'm not particularly tough myself, and I don't have a motorcycle. I wish I did. But my guess is that this kind of dude would want to smell like cigarettes, lack of hygiene, engine oil, cheap whiskey, maybe bad life choices.

So [00:10:00] whatever the cologne smelled like, bikers didn't want it. And I suppose if, uh, if we could actually get our hands on this stuff, those who wanna cosplay being a biker might, maybe they could pull it off. I don't know. 

Next on the list is, uh, maybe the most appropriate for all you nerds out there, which is the Nintendo Power Glove. This snapshot is a little more high definition than the other examples because, I mean, come on, Nintendo. Am I right? So anyway, in 1989, this gaming peripheral was so notoriously bad it inspired the line, "I love the Power Glove.

It's so bad," uh, from that movie The Wizard. 

The Power Glove released for the NES in 1989 was a motion control peripheral built on gesture [00:11:00] recognition tech. originally developed by MIT grad Thomas Zimmerman in 1981. The

The problem with the Power Glove is that it was rushed into production. Mattel had only about five months to turn an expensive lab prototype into a mass-market product in time for Christmas in 1989. And to hit the deadline and the price point, they swapped out the

glove's

high-end fiber optic finger sensors for cheap alternatives, which resulted in obviously crappy responsiveness. Finger gestures didn't usually register the way they were supposed to, and the ultrasonic tracking system just required a really fussy calibration process against receivers mounted on the TV But even worse than all that, almost no games were even built to actually use it.

Only a single title was designed specifically for it at launch. So even the people who wanted [00:12:00] to love it had nothing worthwhile p- to play on. So the hype ended up outrunning the hardware. it sold close to a million units initially, driven largely by its starring role in the movie The Wizard. But its so bad reputation caught up with it fast once people actually tried to use it.

 But that's not the whole story either, because decades later, the Power Glove's failures is often cited as part of what pushed Nintendo towards the motion control approach that became the Wii remote, which actually worked

[00:13:00] That's Dave talking again, years before Font Awesome, talking about walking into a Y Combinator interview with basically zero plan. And it ended up going nowhere. But, but listen to what he says right after describing the failure. He doesn't just move past it. He names the lesson right on the spot. Leave nothing on the table because you don't always get a second shot.

Years later, Dave got that second shot and it was the same interview at Y Combinator, but this time it was with, uh, Travis Chase as his co-founder. Nice work, Travis. Dave's lucky to have you. And, uh, they had a completely different approach. After their first Font Awesome interview, they got an unexpected callback for a second round.

And this time, instead of [00:14:00] winging it, they went and sat in the Mountain View Public Library with a childhood friend of Dave's, Ryan, and, uh, they started working through every hard question that they could think of

And we went to, I think, the Mountain View Public Library, and we just started thinking through the questions we had already gotten asked. Mm-hmm. Better answers. Uh- Better answers. Better answers Better answers or different answers or, okay, well let's think about, okay, the idea we were going in with at the time was Font Awesome.

Right. It was, you know, one of the... I just, I will never forget this because it was like, okay, you know, where could this go? Where could this... And so one of the things we always compare ourselves to was Adobe Typekit. Well, Typekit at the time, and then Adobe's bought it, and they, Adobe Typekit, now Adobe Fonts.

But it was like, okay, so what is that worth? Well, Adobe's a public company. So Ryan's like, "Hey, let's look up their financials. Let's see, okay, if you were to be that size, what would that be? And then if you..." You know, and so it was just, it was this really meticulous, you know, really good, especially for me, to go through and think, okay- Look at the comparables.

Yeah. What, what are your [00:15:00] comps? What could you grow into? How could you get there? How would you layer on top of that? How big is that currently? How many users, how many people do we have using Font Awesome right now? Mm. Yeah. Those are all prospective users. This is the group that, you know, the group and the following that we have already.

Yeah. And so we were able to go into the interview-

One of the things they leaned on was a direct comparison to Adobe's Typekit. Now, now it's called Adobe Fonts, and that was their proof that a font licensing business could actually scale. And that prep paid off, and then something happened that almost never does. They got that surprise second interview, and this time it was with Kevin Hale, one of YC's design-focused partners He and I really got to talk like eye to eye and just question, question, answer, question, back and forth. And that was that connection, right? So y- in any interview you're doing of any kind, you're not just looking to give correct answers, you're looking to connect with the human being that's sitting across from you, right?

Right. That you're actually connecting on more than [00:16:00] just a factual information exchange level, but there's like, there's a, there's like a wavelength you're trying to connect on. Mm-hmm. Um, and we just snapped right to it. And for any question that, uh, I did not have just the absolute perfect answer to right then, boom, Travis steps right in.

Mm-hmm. Travis stepped right in and had the answer. I don't even remember which questions it was, but it was just like boom, back and forth, boom, both of us throwing in. And then, uh, I think Kevin Hale had a question at one point and I was like, "No, no, I don't think that. I think it's this. I think this is the real truth underneath this."

Mm-hmm. And it was this great like kind of getting to just go back and forth on it.

As Dave remembers it, he was watching the other partners in the room, and they were smiling at the exchange that he and Kevin were having. same guy, same interview format seven years apart.

The difference between we weren't prepped at all and a room full of people smiling because this time you clearly were prepped and ready. Does that sound familiar at all?

Okay, so there's your tour. A, uh, flunked out MIT student, [00:17:00] a product named badly enough to confuse its own customers, an interview that nobody prepped for. None of that looks like a success story on its own, but it's basically the only way Font Awesome actually got built, not despite the failures, but through them.

If there's one practical thing worth taking from any of this, it's probably smaller than it sounds. 

At one point in the conversation, Dave said something that has always really s- stuck out to me, and he says that humility is one of the things that we look for most in the people that we hire here at Font Awesome. And it's not like we're patting ourselves on the back here. We haven't got it figured out, and anyone who tells you their whole company has humility completely nailed probably doesn't even understand the word.

But it's the thing that made this whole episode possible in the first place. Somebody had to be humble enough to call a bad name choice a bad name choice. Humble enough to say, we had one person sign [00:18:00] up, just one person. Humble enough to admit MIT beat him twice before it didn't. 

And none of that gets spoken out loud by somebody more interested in looking right than being right. Samuel West, the curator who started all this, the guy, you know, from the Museum of Failure, he put it better than we could, really. " To learn from failure, we need to talk about it." So that's what we did. 

Thanks for sticking around for this episode of Podcast Awesome. Podcast Awesome, per usual, is produced and edited by this guy right here, Matt Johnson. The Podcast Awesome theme song was composed by Ronnie Martin. The music interstitials were composed by Zach Malm, and we got video editing help from Isaac Chase.

Now, you know what to do. Go forth and, go forth and, uh, fail awesomely. [00:19:00] I don't know. Uh

No, no, no. I remember. I remember. Go make something awesome