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Fail Fast, Fail Funny: 💩 The Saga of Poop.com
May 27, 2025
by Hadassah Jacobs
You hear it everywhere in startup circles: Fail fast. Test quickly, pivot often, learn faster than your ego can recover. But nothing — and I mean nothing — prepared me for the first and most fragrant failure of my entrepreneurial career: Poop.com.
Yes, that’s what we named it. No, it never made it to a website. But oh, it lives on in legend.
I was 14, maybe 15, when my friend Vicki and I hatched what we were sure was a genius idea. People love gardens. Gardens love fertilizer. And what’s fertilizer if not... well, poop? Specifically, dog poop. Abundant. Free. Organic. What could go wrong?
So we got to work — armed with garbage bags, youthful optimism, and a total lack of understanding of city ordinances. We combed the neighborhood, collecting nature’s leftovers. Back at Vicki’s house, we laid out newspapers in the backyard, dried the "inventory," pulverized it (don’t ask), and prepared to bag it.
We were one step away from creating artisanal, locally sourced, eco-friendly dog manure fertilizer. Poop.com was going to the moon.
Until Vicki’s dad came home.
He stepped into the backyard, looked around at what could only be described as a poop-laden Jackson Pollock of ambition, and said the words no founder wants to hear:
“Vicki. Kim. Get out here. What is this?!”
We said proudly, “It’s our new business!”
He said, less proudly, “Well, you’re gonna have to start it somewhere else. Get this &$%@ off my lawn.”
We said, “But it’s on newspaper!”
Didn’t matter.
Startup closed. Day one. RIP Poop.com.
What’s the takeaway?
Not every idea is a winner. Some stink from the start. But every idea — even the crappy ones — teaches you something.
You learn to test. You learn to talk to stakeholders (ahem — like parents). You learn to ask, “Should we actually do this?” before... doing this.
But more than anything, you learn to laugh. Because entrepreneurship isn’t always glam and grind. Sometimes it’s piles of poop on newspaper.
So go ahead — build, break, repeat. Just maybe don’t use your friend’s backyard as an industrial composting site.
🚀 We're born to build — even if we bomb along the way.
— Hadas
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