The School of Mistakes and Failures
Starting Out: The Breinchild Story - How Three Businesspeople (Who Knew Little About Software) Built a Skateboard SaaS Product
~This story is shared with Caffeine from the founders of Breinchild / Emplify ~
"Failure is not only the best teacher, it’s the only teacher." — Serge Van Dam
We all know innovation is critical to sustained business success. And yet, most businesses struggle to do it well, let alone consistently. Talking to Caffeine’s startup audience, where innovation is practically a survival skill, might seem ironic. But here’s the point: Launching a startup with an innovative idea is one thing. Building a business where innovation thrives every day? That’s another challenge entirely.
The extent to which innovation is part and parcel of your organisation’s cultural DNA, embedded in how everyone thinks, works, and interacts every day, will determine your future.
During Covid, three Kiwis bonded over a shared frustration: why is sustained innovation so damn hard? We believed there had to be a better way to help businesses be and stay innovative. We called ourselves Breinchild—‘Brein’ for questioning the rules, ‘child’ for staying curious.
Three years later, we’ve built Emplify, a SaaS product designed to tackle one of the biggest but least tangible barriers to sustained innovation: culture. Culture is the invisible force feeding or stalling innovation and growth.
Understanding the problem and delivering the first step in our vision has been humbling. For three experienced businesspeople, backing ourselves (figuratively and financially) has required grit, determination, and resilience. We’ve made our share of mistakes, but each one has taught us something valuable.
This article is about sharing those lessons. It’s a raw, unfiltered look at what we got wrong, so you can get it right. It’s also about ditching the fear of failure and using it as fuel.
Being a Startup: A Crash Course in Humility (and Learning the Hard Way)
Startups are like bootcamps for your ego. We’ve been through the gauntlet of mistakes and come out the other side a little bruised but much wiser. Here are a few lessons from our School of Mistakes and Failures:
Underestimating Investor Expectations: When we started during the Covid lockdown, the word we were hearing on the street indicated that investors were willing to take bigger risks on potential and passion. Post-Covid? Not so much. We learned the hard way that clarity, traction, and cold hard evidence close deals, not just a great idea and enthusiasm. And also the importance of talking to investors early - before you’re ready to pitch. The better you understand them, the more prepared you’ll be when the time is right.
Falling into the Product-Perfection Trap: We spent way too much time in our bubble, obsessing over tweaks and features, when we should’ve been out talking to customers. The real magic happens outside your comfort zone, connecting with people, understanding their needs, and gathering feedback.
Rushing into Code: Our ambition got the better of us, and we started building before we’d fully mapped out the user journey. Locking ourselves into early decisions turned out to be an expensive detour. Patience and planning upfront would’ve saved us a lot of headaches later.
Dreaming Big, Too Soon: Chasing the big, beautiful vision was inspiring but it also sucked up resources we should’ve spent building a lean, scrappy MVP. Fancy prototypes are fine, but nothing teaches you like putting something in the hands of real users.
Speeding Without Reflection: Momentum feels great until you realise you’re barreling past opportunities to learn and adjust. We were so focused on moving fast, we forgot that sometimes you need to slow down to go further.
Trying to Please Everyone: We started broad, trying to appeal to too many customer groups. When we finally narrowed our focus, everything clicked. It’s amazing how saying “no” to the wrong audiences makes it easier to say “yes” to the right ones.
Turns out, every mistake we made taught us something invaluable. And while we’re not perfect (far from it), we’re a lot closer to building something that truly works and helps others do the same.
These mistakes have cost us time and money. Sometimes, we get a bit emotional about that, but it’s the reality. Today, we can’t change our past; we can only impact our future. And we did get some things right.
We hold each other tight. Personally, each of us has had our own journey. Founders are humans. We respect each other's space and try to be there for support.
We employed an awesome human as our CTO. He made the decision to join us because of shared values and ambition. While his expertise has been critical in our product development, he brings so much more to the table.
We let things go. They say the strategy is mostly about what you say no to. When you are building something and you are wedded to an amazing vision, there is no shortage of audacious ideas and dreams. We have learnt and adapted.
We have built a brand and associated assets. Knowing who we are as a brand, how we show up (and don’t), our tone of voice, our writing style sets us up to talk with confidence and consistency in the short term and will pay back by building future demand.
In a feedback session with one of our Pilot customers, he talked about the risk of Startups trying to build the racing car without any scaffolding. He reminded us that the journey is an iterative one, build the skateboard…learn…then the scooter…learn… then the motorbike…learn…then the small car…eventually you will have a racing car …and that racing car can always get better.
Every great journey starts somewhere, and for us, it’s Emplify Discover…a skateboard with big aspirations. It’s the first step toward transforming how organisations understand and shape their culture. When you uncover your cultural Traits, the strengths that drive you forward and the areas holding you back, you unlock fresh ideas and new pathways to success. With this clarity, culture stops being something that just happens to you. Instead, it becomes something you actively shape, steering your organisation toward a future full of possibilities and enhanced performance.
What Comes Next
We’re still finding our wings. To survive, we’ve had to embrace the hustle; selling is a skill we’re learning every day. We’re proud of what we’ve created so far, and we want to share it with high-performing teams and businesses that are as hell-bent on growth and innovation as we are. Feedback from these early adopters will inform how our skateboard evolves. Incidentally, the same Pilot Partner who gave us the skateboard analogy reckoned our skateboard was already a motorbike. That was a nice fist-pump moment.
A Special Offer for Caffeine Readers
To help you get underway, we’re offering something special: the first 5 organisations or teams to sign up will get Emplify Discover for free. And for everyone else, we’re offering a 50% discount exclusively for Caffeine readers.
Find out how your culture can be your innovation superpower. Contact us at hello@breinchild.com