What if failure is the training ground that prepares an entrepreneur for a meaningful breakthrough? In How to Fail: I Got Really Fucking Good at It, Robert Strode explores that possibility through a candid account of ambition, costly mistakes, persistence, and starting over.
A Life Built Around Starting Again
Robert’s entrepreneurial story began long before he opened his first online business. His childhood included chaos, homelessness, drugs, gangs, and life on the streets. Those experiences shaped a survival instinct that would later become one of his greatest strengths: the ability to get back up after everything falls apart.
After finding his way into a regular job, Robert discovered the world of online business around 2014. The possibilities fascinated him. A person could create a website, find an audience, and earn real money without following a traditional career path. That discovery sparked more than a decade of experiments.
One early venture focused on chicken coops. The niche website became a genuine success, generating more than $200,000 in sales. Robert eventually sold the business, proving that his online ambitions could produce tangible results. Success brought momentum, confidence, and a hunger to find the next opportunity.
Then came Fortnite dropshipping, neglected websites, social apps, marketplaces, cryptocurrency, meme coins, mobile apps, AI projects, and several ideas that consumed money without gaining traction. Some failed because of poor timing. Others depended heavily on platforms, lacked validation, or solved problems that customers barely cared about.
Every attempt added another expensive lesson. Somehow, each disappointment also made the next idea feel possible.
Entrepreneurship Without the Polished Filter
How to Fail: I Got Really Fucking Good at It presents entrepreneurship as it often happens behind closed doors. There are wasted budgets, rejected concepts, technical frustrations, burnout, false starts, and brief victories that create just enough hope to keep someone moving.
Robert writes while he’s still building. That perspective gives the book an immediate, relatable energy. He hasn’t wrapped every experience into a flawless success formula. He shares what happened, what it cost, and what he learned while navigating uncertainty.
The result is funny, painful, profane, and deeply human. Readers see how easily excitement can lead to overbuilding. They learn why a promising idea still needs genuine customer interest and why platform dependency can become dangerous. They also witness the emotional cycle familiar to many founders: inspiration, obsession, doubt, disappointment, reflection, and another late-night session at the laptop.
One of the book’s most valuable ideas is simple. Building a product can be easier than convincing people to care about it. Entrepreneurs frequently spend months creating something before testing whether customers truly want it. Robert’s experiences encourage founders to question assumptions, seek feedback earlier, and pressure-test ideas before committing serious time or money.
That lesson connects with Marketur, his free business idea pressure-testing tool. The project helps entrepreneurs challenge their thinking before they begin building. It reflects knowledge gained through lived experience, including the kind that arrived through failed launches and painful financial losses.
The story eventually circles back to chicken coops. That return feels fitting. It shows how entrepreneurship can move in unexpected loops, bringing a person back to familiar territory with better judgment and a much larger collection of stories.
About the Author
Robert is an entrepreneur, online business builder, and persistent experimenter who has spent more than a decade creating websites, apps, marketplaces, e-commerce ventures, crypto projects, and AI-powered ideas. His work includes profitable businesses, unsuccessful launches, sold ventures, and concepts that disappeared before finding an audience.
His writing draws strength from honesty. Robert speaks openly about childhood instability, life on the streets, financial mistakes, and the inner drive that keeps him trying again. His perspective will resonate with startup founders, indie hackers, creators, side-hustlers, and anyone wondering whether one more attempt could finally work.
Conclusion: Failure Has Something to Teach
How to Fail: I Got Really Fucking Good at It, available on Amazon, gives readers an unfiltered look at the messy reality of building businesses. It celebrates persistence, sharper questions, and lessons earned through experience.
Robert’s journey remains unfinished, which makes it especially compelling. He’s still learning, still building, and still listening to that dangerous little voice asking, “What if this one works?”
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!