Why Failure Is Your Best Growth Hack | Bathroom Break #68 🚽

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Marketing Millennials – Episode "Why Failure Is Your Best Growth Hack | Bathroom Break #68 🚽"

Release Date: August 11, 2025
Host: Daniel Murray
Guests: Jay Schwedelson (Host of "Do This Not That" Podcast)

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Introduction

In the 68th episode of The Marketing Millennials, titled "Why Failure Is Your Best Growth Hack," host Daniel Murray teams up with Jay Schwedelson from the "Do This Not That" podcast to delve into the pivotal role of failure in marketing. This special installment, part of their collaborative series "Bathroom Break," offers a candid discussion on embracing failure as a catalyst for growth and improvement in marketing strategies.

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Embracing Failure in Marketing

Jay Schwedelson kicks off the conversation by emphasizing the necessity of being comfortable with failure to foster growth in both personal and professional realms:

"Failure is actually how you grow in anything in your personal life, in your business, in your marketing."
— Jay Schwedelson [01:54]

He underscores that recognizing and accepting failure is foundational before delving into specific marketing tactics.

Daniel Murray echoes this sentiment, likening marketing efforts to "at bats" in baseball, where not every attempt will succeed. He points out that unnoticed or poorly received marketing endeavors simply fade away, making room for new strategies without significant repercussions.

"Marketing is all about at bats. It could be the 11th, 12th, 13th thing you do that could catapult your brand to the next level."
— Daniel Murray [02:36]

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Learning from Failure

The discussion transitions to the importance of documenting failures to extract valuable lessons. Jay highlights that celebrating only the successes while ignoring the failures can lead to repeated mistakes:

"If you're not comfortable with failure, you're not going to grow. Period. End of story."
— Jay Schwedelson [01:54]

He elaborates on the need to categorize different failed tactics to understand what doesn't work, thereby preventing the recurrence of the same errors.

Daniel adds that without a structured approach to evaluating failed campaigns—such as analyzing whether it was the wrong audience, an ineffective color scheme, or a misleading call-to-action—teams may continue to stumble over the same issues.

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Creating a Culture that Accepts Failure

A pivotal point in the conversation revolves around fostering an organizational culture that accepts and learns from failure. Jay emphasizes that sharing failures without attributing blame encourages a healthy environment where team members feel safe to experiment and innovate:

"You can't make people feel uncomfortable about a failure occurring because if you don't have an environment where failure is extremely acceptable, then you're gonna have a really hard time as a business or as a marketing department growing in any way."
— Jay Schwedelson [04:02]

This openness ensures that failures are viewed as stepping stones rather than setbacks, promoting continual improvement.

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Implementing Kill Criteria

To manage and mitigate prolonged failures, Daniel Murray advocates for establishing clear kill criteria or tripwires for campaigns. This involves setting predefined metrics and timelines to evaluate the success of a campaign, allowing teams to make informed decisions about whether to continue or discontinue efforts:

"Have a kill criteria or a trip wire to say, like, after seven days, if I'm at, like, conversion rates, don't raise by X percent or something doesn't happen here. We shut off this campaign and it's agreed upon ahead of time."
— Daniel Murray [04:51]

This proactive approach prevents the wastage of resources on underperforming campaigns and ensures that focus remains on strategies that yield results.

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The Concept of Failing Fast

Jay introduces the concept of failing fast, cautioning against the dangers of clinging to ideas due to personal attachment or ego. He shares a personal example from his media business, Grew Media Hub, where an ill-fated awards program was promptly discontinued upon recognizing its lack of potential:

"Holding on is really how you hurt a business."
— Jay Schwedelson [05:50]

By swiftly identifying and terminating unsuccessful initiatives, businesses can redirect their efforts toward more promising ventures, fostering agility and resilience.

Daniel concurs, sharing his own experience with the Marketing Millennials podcast's foray into TikTok. Realizing that the platform wasn't yielding desired growth despite multiple attempts, he made the strategic decision to pivot focus to more effective channels:

"Sometimes you have to pull it. [...] make sure you're not having your ego tied to a campaign, even if it was your idea."
— Daniel Murray [07:43]

This illustrates the practical application of failing fast to optimize marketing strategies continually.

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Personal Anecdotes on Failure

The conversation takes a personal turn as Daniel Murray shares his attempts and failures with various diets, reflecting the universality of failure beyond the professional sphere:

"I tried, like, keto and, like, I felt, like, super sick on keto, and I tried, like, trying vegetarian for a little bit. Hated that. So it's, like, flopped a lot of."
— Daniel Murray [07:57]

Jay Schwedelson humorously acknowledges his own pattern of frequent failures, reinforcing the episode's central theme that failure is an inevitable and instructive part of growth:

"I fail all the time. I'm very. I'm actually the only thing I'm. I don't fail at is failing."
— Jay Schwedelson [08:27]

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Conclusion

The episode wraps up with a reinforcement of the discussed principles, urging listeners to embrace failure as an essential element of successful marketing. By fostering a culture that accepts and learns from failure, implementing clear criteria for campaign evaluations, and adopting a fail-fast mentality, marketers can navigate challenges more effectively and drive sustained growth.

Key Takeaways:

• Embrace Failure: Accept failure as a natural part of growth in marketing and beyond.
• Document and Learn: Systematically record failed efforts to extract actionable insights.
• Create a Supportive Culture: Encourage openness about failures without assigning blame.
• Set Kill Criteria: Define clear metrics and timelines to evaluate and terminate underperforming campaigns.
• Fail Fast: Recognize when to pivot or discontinue initiatives to allocate resources efficiently.

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Connect with The Marketing Millennials:

• LinkedIn: The Marketing Millennials
• Instagram: @the_marketing_millennials
• Newsletter Signup: The Marketing Millennials Newsletter
• Follow Daniel Murray on Twitter: @Dmurr68

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Transcript

[Daniel Murray]

Welcome to a new special series called the Bathroom break. That extra 10 minutes you either have to listen to marking tips or use the bathroom or both. But I don't recommend both. But that's your choice.

[Jay Schwedelson]

This collab is going to be super fun. We have Daniel Murray from the Marketing Millennials and me, Jay Schwedelson from the do this not that podcast and subjectline.com each episode in the series, we are going to go over quick tips about different marketing topics. And if you want to be in the bathroom, fine, just don't tell us about it. Thanks for checking it out.

[Daniel Murray]

We are back with another episode of Bathroom Break. I'm here with the Jay Swedelson. I'll do this not that podcast. The number one podcast in the world. And I am Murray. And the question I have for you today is I, I know that, like, it's hot in Florida and are you like, pool guy? Are you a beach guy? Are you a water park guy? Like, what type of like? Or you just, like, stay inside guy?

[Jay Schwedelson]

I'm 100% a pool person. I love a good pool and, you know, I really do like water parks, but my kids have aged out of it. They're like, you know, older teenagers. And Allie has always thought water parks are absolutely, literally the most disgusting things that exist on earth. Like, I think that she thinks Covid started in a water park somewhere, which it might be true. So, yeah, that's my job. I feel like you could crush a water park.

[Daniel Murray]

I love a good slide. Yeah, like a good slide. You can't be a good or lazy river.

[Jay Schwedelson]

Laser is the best.

[Daniel Murray]

A good side or lazy river.

[Jay Schwedelson]

If you don't like a lazy river, you should unfollow my show. That's basically how strongly I feel. So what are we talking about today?

[Daniel Murray]

We're talking about failing in marketing. So why don't you kick it off and like, what is your view on, like, failure marketing? What should people do or how should they think about failure?

[Jay Schwedelson]

First of all, get, get very comfortable having failure, because failure is actually how you grow in anything in your personal life, in your business, in your marketing. I mean, here I'm the email guy, right? So just think about email for a second. Most people out there, their average email open rate is less than 50%, right? So out of the gate, you're failing, you're failing to get the majority of people to actually even open up your emails. And yet we celebrate getting a 47% open rate. It's amazing. So I think the number one thing before you get into little tactics and stuff is if you're not comfortable with failure, you're not going to grow. Period. End of story.

[Daniel Murray]

100%. I think marketing is all about at bats. And it could be the 11th, 12, 13 thing you do that could catapult your brand to the next level. Get seen by someone else. And the good thing is, like, nobody really likes really, unless it's like a terrible thought. Sees the bad marketing you do because it doesn't get unseen. It gets unseen. People don't recognize it. So failing's okay. But I. One thing that we've. I used to. What I highly recommend is if you like failure should be reversed and thought. Thought about like a learning document. Like, like, failure is all about, like, we tested something, and what do we learn from this test that we do so we don't repeat that mistake? What I see a lot of mistakes that people make is like, they're very. They're like, okay with failure. But then nobody documents that flopped email, that flopped landing page, that. That flopped campaign. And like, the learnings, like, was it the wrong audience? Was this color? Was this cta? Like, you have to do that and share that through an org. Because I see time and time again people make the same mistakes because they didn't share, like, the actual takeaways and learnings from that. And that's like, I think that's worse than failing, not actually having a learning from the failure.

[Jay Schwedelson]

It's so true. Because what happens is you do a campaign that does well, and it was like, okay, what did we do? We got to do that again. And when you break down things, you do want to document your failures, but you have to document the tactics used, all the different tactics, and you have to put them into buckets so you know what didn't work. And the other big thing is that when you are documenting all of this, okay, it's not like you're throwing shade on somebody because, oh, that wasn't great. That was your idea. That was whatever. You have to celebrate the fact that you're sharing the learnings internally. And you can't make people feel uncomfortable about a failure occurring because if you don't have an environment where failure is extremely acceptable, then you're gonna have a really hard time as a business or as a marketing department growing in any way.

[Daniel Murray]

I also think that, like, when you go into a campaign that you run or anything you run, you need to have a kill criteria or a trip wire to say, like, after seven days, if I'm at, like, conversion rates, don't Raise by X percent or something doesn't happen here. We shut off this campaign and it's agreed upon ahead of time. Like, you need to have some sort of tripwire in your system that flag something because otherwise you can go for months and months and not. And run a failed. Your failed marketing for a long time. So I recommend, like, you know, that the campaign could probably. There's a chance it could fail. So have a, A, A, A key metric that you're tracking against. And, you know, if we hit this, if we don't hit this metric or we, we're trending way below it, we kill this campaign and have that timeline mapped out so everybody's on the same page that, like, okay, it's okay to kill this if we hit. Don't hit this metric, you know?

[Jay Schwedelson]

And in general, from a bigger business standpoint, I'm a big believer in failing fast. People get their ego tied to an idea. They themselves like the idea so much, and they hold on to something, and that's where they spend a lot of money. That's how businesses go out of business, is they just. They stay. They hold on too long. I'll give you an example. So with my media business, grew Media Hub, we put on these events, whatever, and we're like, oh, we should have an awards program. And we came up with this whole big idea. We thought it was gonna be incredible. We launched Guru Awards, which probably nobody has ever heard of because we launched it and it was horrendous. Even though we had it all mapped out, we had a whole plan, but we knew really fast. We're like, you know what? There's no legs here. Even if this thing doubles or triples or quadruples in performance, there's no legs here. And we killed it. And we learned a lot from it. And we doubled down other places. But holding on is. Is really how you hurt a business.

[Daniel Murray]

I think we all have those one or two examples. Like, even with, like, the marketing millennials, we really thought, I thought three years ago that we can. We should go on TikTok. And we just weren't good at doing it and we weren't seeing any growth. And we, I made a decision, like, let's just double down on the two channels that were working because, like, TikTok flopped. Like, for us, we. We couldn't put the content on that channel to make it work, so we pulled the channel instead of just keeping putting bad stuff out into the world. So, like, sometimes you have to pull it. And it also is like the thing too, with like, continuing on that path. It's like you're taking resources away from things that are exc. Like, you're gonna. That could actually work. So make sure, like, you're. You're not having your ego tied to a campaign, even if it was your idea. Just, like putting. Pull the plug and go to things that are going to work because results matter at the end of the day.

[Jay Schwedelson]

So speaking of failures, have you ever tried, like, a diet or something and you just failed? Or everything that you try in your personal life, you just. You crush it? Or a new workout routine?

[Daniel Murray]

So many. I had a berries boot camp era.

[Jay Schwedelson]

Oh, I like the berries.

[Daniel Murray]

And then. And then I had era. It was an error. And then I had. I used to work for this company called Snack Nation, where I met Ari. And we. It was like, a very health company, so, like, so many people. So I tried, like, keto and, like, I felt, like, super sick on keto, and I tried, like, trying vegetarian for a little bit. Hated that. So it's, like, flopped a lot of.

[Jay Schwedelson]

So you're a failure.

[Daniel Murray]

I'm a failure.

[Jay Schwedelson]

Perfect. Yeah. Yeah. I fail all the time. I'm very. I'm actually the only thing I'm. I don't fail at is failing. So there you go. All right, well, thanks for checking this out. Hey, share this on your story on Instagram, tag the Marketing Millennials or at J. Schweddelson, and we will put you in our story if you put us in your story. So keep it real. And. Yeah, later, Daniel. Come on, man. I gotta get back to work. Get out of there. All right, while he's still in there. This is Jay. Check out my podcast, do this, not that, for Marketers. Each week we share really quick tips on stuff that can improve your marketing and hope you give it a try. Oh, here's Daniel. He's finally out.

[Daniel Murray]

Back from my bathroom break. This is Daniel. Go follow the Market Millennials podcast, but also tune into this series. It's once a week, the Bathroom Break. We talk about marketing tips that we just spew out. And it could be anything from email subject line to any marketing tips in the world. We'll talk about it. Just give us a. A shout on LinkedIn and tell us what you want to hear. Peace out.