I Launched & It Failed, What Now? Working Through Business Grief
*DISCLAIMER: this post will not be a solution to business failure or a three step system to fix “broken” launches. This is solidarity, validation, & encouragement.
So you launched a new something - product, service, program, offer - and it failed.
Like it really failed.
It did next to nothing, or just plain nothing.
And you were left kind of befuddled and deeply disappointed because you worked really hard on it, it meant a lot to you, financially & energetically, and it’s failure feels just as much personal as it does professional.
So what do you do now?
A Kind Of Grief That We Don't Talk About
I know grief, unfortunately. And I’ve worked through it many times over in my life.
The grief that comes after a death, the grief that comes after an ending, the grief that comes from leaving something behind…and the thing is, business grief can feel like a combo of all three.
A few weeks back I re-opened the doors to The Haven, my community for creative women entrepreneurs. It came after a hiatus from it’s initial existence back in 2024, a season of “I don’t know”, and some much needed clarity around my business and what I wanted to be doing.
I spent months planning, shifting, talking about, and promoting The Haven. I felt really good about it - confident, excited, and aligned. And then the doors opened and…nothing.No one joined, nothing happened.
I did all the things - followed up, chatted with women on the wait list, continued with my planned post-doors open strategy - but what it came down to was bad timing. There were a lot of things outside my control and things I could have done differently and it all impacted the launch.
After a chat with a good business pal, I came to the realization that this membership wasn’t truly where my energy wanted to go and, ultimately, it would have been hard to do everything else I want to be doing and manage a healthy membership community. And that wouldn’t have been fair to the women inside - that was the clincher for me.
So I made the decision to stop pushing and put a pause on The Haven.
And this is where the grief hit.
My first impulse was to dismiss it, call it me being “dramatic”, and just get on with it already! But my healing has taught me enough to know that emotions are information and worthy of my attention.
I had to acknowledge the dual grief I was feeling…
The failure of this launch meant something financial & functional for my business.
The failure of this launch meant something deeply emotional for me.
Both were valid, both were important.
As entrepreneurs, especially those of us who provide support and service for others, what we put out there becomes a part of our business identity, for better or worse. We attach ourselves to outcomes, big ideas, and the future of our business because we, at the end of the day, are responsible for it all.
So when something fails, it feels like WE fail.
The grief that’s not talked about enough in the small business world is that grief - the one that comes from it not just being a business failure, but a ‘you’ failure.
Grief As Business Data
So it was bad, and I spent a full week being sad, being disappointed, letting myself feel whatever it was I needed to feel. But because I am, and always have been, action focused, I decided to do what I’ve learned to do - use my grief as data.
I asked these 3 questions:
1. Who was driving this launch? Was it me, or the pressure I’d absorbed from somewhere else?
2. Did urgency override my instinct at any point along the way?
3. What was I actually chasing? Was it the membership itself, or what I thought it meant about me and my business?
My answers told me more about where I’d been, where I wanted to be going, and why I was here than I’d realized.
It made me confront a few things that were a bit uncomfortable but necessary.
The truth under the grief was:
I wasn’t honoring my capacity, I was chasing a metric.
I was coming from a ‘should’ and not a ‘want’.
I was trying to make fetch happen when I really wanted to be playing a different game all together with these incredible women.
And I used that information to plan my next step which is 1:1 opportunities, workshops, and lecturing.
Grief & Relief: The Greatest Data Duo
Let me ask you a question and I want you to be super duper honest.
After your last business thing failed, other than disappointment, what did you feel?
Since we’re being honest, I felt relief after The Haven failed and I made the decision to pause it.
Grief and relief, the wildest but most realistic pairing out there.
The first time I felt grief and relief was when my dad died in 2001. He’d battled cancer for years and I watched him deteriorate, and become a shell of the man I knew. I was deep in my grief after his death but also feeling relief that he was no longer fighting and losing.
Grief and relief as my kids grow up and I mourn their little bitty selves but am relieved to be out of the toddler trenches.
Grief and relief as I feel the disappointment of failed business ventures but relieved that I can take what I’ve learned, move on and have the space to try again.
Your failure is something to grieve, but it’s also ok to recognize the relief too.
We all have a business failure story…
Laurel poured herself into a brilliant 3 week intensive in her astrology business. It came to her as a genius download and she was over-the-moon excited for it - it was needed, it was aligned, it brought something incredible to her audience.
And then no one joined. She was confused, disappointed, and questioning herself. But when she stopped to really look at it, while the promotion for the intensive was on point, her energy behind it was rushed, forced, and anxious - and her audience felt that.
She also realized that there was a lot that needed to happen behind the scenes to make the logistics of running the program easier. So she shifted her focus to back end optimization and put the program on the back burner until all the pieces are in place and her energy is grounded.
Catrina, a learning design specialist, launched her first course to exactly zero sales. She felt all the things, questioned all the angles, why was no one buying?!
What she learned, which so many entrepreneurs eventually learn as well, is that you shouldn’t pour time, energy, and resources into a product you haven’t validated. Yep, Catrina created a fantastic course but did it without knowing if her audience actually needed or wanted it!
So she took what she learned from that failed course, and her extensive background in education design, and reworked it all into a successful business.
Christi, an automation specialist and SAAS founder, had grown her business for years and hit the exciting point where she was ready to bring on support! She quickly hired a small team and then, just as quickly, realized she’d acted too fast.
Managing a team meant having systems in place to support them, setting aside time to lead them, being a boss in a business where you’ve only had to “boss” yourself. And as the wheels started to come off it wasn’t just her own disappointment she had to deal with, it was a team of other women who were looking to her.
Christi had to give herself a crash course in people management and also recognized that hiring help wasn’t the hands off magic bullet to ease and freedom she assumed it would be.
Grieve It, But Don’t Let It Define You
Now this is going to sound really cliche and I give you full permission to roll your eyes:
Your business failures do not define who you are as a person or an entrepreneur.
These “failures”, and the emotions that follow, are proof that you give a shit about what you’re doing and the people you’re trying to help.
They are lessons in resilience, patience, and flexibility.
They are disappointing, frustrating, and defeating, but they are also information.What have your business failures been trying to tell you?
Spend some time with them, feel the grief (and maybe the relief) and then use all of that to decide on your next right thing.
If you’re in the middle of something like this - a launch that didn’t work, a pivot you can’t quite see yet, a business that needs a clearer direction - that’s exactly what my Feminine Authority Content Consults are for.
We’re not just fixing what has failed, we’re creating a plan that includes all that good failure data!
