The Opportunity to Repair Mistakes
Entrepreneur Office Hours - Issue #320
Inside the Office
I had a conversation with a student founder recently that stuck with me — a small operational hiccup that ended up revealing a much bigger lesson.
A customer’s booking had failed on the student’s platform. A glitch. An oops. The kind of thing that happens in early product releases all the time.
But what struck me most was the founder’s reaction to it.
“Oh it won’t happen again, we fixed the bug,” they said.
And that’s the trap.
Early stage founders love dashboards: total bookings, conversion rates, growth curves. One failed booking looks statistically irrelevant. But startups aren’t experienced as aggregated metrics. They’re experienced one moment at a time by one human customer at a time.
For that customer, it wasn’t “one failed booking.” It was a broken experience. Silence where they expected answers. A small breach of their trust.
And while it might sound quiet back there behind the dashboard, unreliability gets loud quickly.
What founders often underestimate is that operational misses rarely stay silent. Customers talk. And they might not complain to you, but I promise that group chats, Slack channels, and Reddit threads are full of people complaining about those misses. A single unreliable experience can travel faster than any marketing message.
And, sure, you cannot can’t what people say about your startup. But you can control whether you gave them a story worth telling about you.
Operational excellence sounds like a late-stage Six Sigma-y concept. It isn’t. In the earliest days, operations is the product. Keeping your promise to deliver value is the whole thing. Without that, what are we doing?
Those quiet misses on your dashboard become your squeakiest wheel detractors.
Now carrying that weight is a lot of pressure. It can make you lose sleep. And I’m absolutely not suggesting that founders live with paranoia or beat themselves up endlessly for mistakes.
Mistakes are inevitable. Especially for bootstrapped founders building fast with limited resources. I’m not advocating for perfection. Full stop.
The goal here, to quote Dr. Becky, is repair.
Once the founder understood the impact, they reached out personally to the affected customer to repair the situation. Not a cookie cutter “oops! we dropped the ball!” template email. Not a defensive explanation. They took ownership and followed up to make it right.
Customers that experience that kind of care don’t churn in a huff. They become invested. Some of my strongest customer relationships in my past startup life came from how I showed up when things weren’t perfect.
When you fix a mistake with care, customers see how you operate under pressure. They see your values in action. They see whether you disappear or lean in. They see if they can count on you.
That moment — the repair — feels really hard at the time, but is often more defining than the failure.
Operational gaps are feedback loops. They show you where the bucket leaks: unclear confirmations, weird edge cases, missing alerts, assumptions about user behavior. Founders who treat every miss as signal build stronger systems faster.
And sometimes, stronger customer relationships too.
Customers whose problems you solve thoughtfully tell your story better than you ever could. Not because everything worked - it won’t! - but because you showed up when it didn’t.
This is the message I want founders to internalize:
You will make mistakes. Your customers will be affected. Your success does not depend on never screwing up; it depends on how you make things right.
Rome wasn’t build in a day and neither is your operational excellence. It’s the accumulation of small fixes, repeated consistently and intentionally.
Your success hinges not only on what you build, but how you respond when it breaks.
-Amy
Worth Your Time
Entrepreneurs spend enormous time debating what to build, how to grow, and when to raise money. Far fewer spend time on the question that quietly drives all of those decisions:
Who am I—and what do I actually want?
That’s why I encourage entrepreneurs to read Designing Your Life. To be fair, Designing Your Life doesn’t look like a startup book at first glance, but in my experience, it may be one of the most important ones an entrepreneur can read.
The core idea is simple: clarity about yourself enables better decisions under uncertainty. And startups are nothing but uncertainty.
The insight from Designing Your Life is that there is no single “right” entrepreneurial path. The mistake founders make isn’t choosing the wrong strategy. It’s choosing a strategy that doesn’t fit the life they want to build. That mismatch shows up later as burnout, resentment, poor decision-making, or walking away from something that could have been great.
If you’re building a startup and feeling stuck on a “strategic” decision, it may not be a strategy problem at all. It may be a self-clarity problem. And that’s a solvable problem Designing Your Life could help with.
Tools We’re Tinkering With
Editor’s note: All resources suggested in this section are based on our opinions. These aren’t affiliate promotions and we don’t generate commissions.
I’m going to slightly adjust our definition of a tool in this issue in order to share a resource that’s seriously helped me, particularly during the busiest stretches of the semester when my to-do list can feel completely unmanageable — teaching, advising students, alumni meetings, speaking requests, and hundreds of emails that all feel urgent at once.
A few years ago, I stumbled onto this simple framework that completely changed how I think about prioritization, and I’ve been using it ever since. If you haven’t heard of it, I promise it’s worth the two minutes it takes to understand. It’s called the Eisenhower Matrix. (Here’s a video explanation if you’re more of a visual learner.)
The matix seems simple, but the impact comes when you apply it. I ask two questions before anything makes it onto my real calendar: does this move the needle for Duke I&E, and is this something only I can do? If the answer to both is yes, it gets my best time and attention. If someone else on the team can handle it, I pass it along. If it’s just noise dressed up as urgency, it goes in the trash (it takes courage to say no).
During crunch time in the semester, this practice is the difference between feeling busy and overwhelmed but spinning my wheels and actually making progress on the things that matter.
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