I heard a piece of advice once, from a community of business owners I was active in, that stuck with me permanently: "How many failures you have encountered and how fast you digest and learn from it will be the indicator of how soon you will be successful — fail fast, learn fast." I didn't fully understand what that meant until I lived through my own version of it — a delivery business that cost me money, time, and a fair amount of pride.
How It Started: A Safety Concern, Not a Business Plan
It didn't even start as a business idea. Tagum City was going through a period where random violence against women had spread enough that even daytime didn't feel safe. As someone with a sister, a mother, a girlfriend, and female church friends I cared about, a few of us — me, Daryll, Gypty, and CJ — talked casually about starting a ride service where riders' identities and IDs would be public, so customers could feel safer knowing exactly who was driving them home.
We named it "Sakay Na?" half-jokingly, and established the Facebook page on May 12, 2023, without thinking too hard about business permits, BIR registration, or any of the formal structure a real business is supposed to have. We just had our own motorcycles and a genuine intention to get people home safely.
Once city safety protocols improved and the original need for the ride service faded, food delivery, errands, and pabili services accidentally became our real, more sustainable focus. We leaned into that instead.
The Decision That Changed Everything: Going Digital Too Fast
Because I've always been technology-oriented, I pushed hard for us to build our own app instead of continuing to operate manually. I wanted us to stand out in our area. The other three agreed, and since we had no real funding, we borrowed money against my own credit limit and had a customized app built through Fiverr — the developer's quote came in around 20,000 to 25,000 pesos, money none of us actually had sitting around.
The app worked. That part genuinely succeeded — a functioning ordering web application, built and delivered. But this is exactly where the real failure began, and it wasn't a technology failure at all.
Where the Business Actually Died: Cash Flow
We had drained our funds building the app, but I hadn't accounted for the fact that marketing and day-to-day operations also needed their own funding — on top of ongoing monthly hosting costs that never stopped, whether we had sales or not. Our sales volume, still small since we'd just transitioned into using the app, couldn't cover all of that combined. Within two months, the entire operation shut down. All that money, gone.
We got buried in debt from our own overreach — I still remember the phrase we used with each other: paying the cost of our own foolishness. Personally, I was in serious financial trouble, and I had to actively look for ways to pay off what I now owed, which eventually pushed me toward applying to BPO accounting jobs in Davao City just to dig myself out.
The Second Attempt: Same Idea, Different Execution
I didn't abandon the idea completely. In December 2024, I tried again — solo this time, rebranding an old Facebook page into "One Click Delivery – Tagum." But this time, I carried the lessons from the first failure directly into how I built it. I didn't overthink or over-analyze the launch. I just executed. And I made one deliberate change: daily vlogs of my deliveries, storytelling, and marketing exposure for the merchants who partnered with the service — content creation woven directly into the operations, since I was rider, editor, and content creator all at once.
When I felt real traction, I gambled again on custom software — this time with the scars of the first failure informing every decision. The result was smoother, more sustainable, without the same monthly maintenance trap that sank the first version.
Eventually, I still chose not to pursue that business long-term — I realized it genuinely wasn't what I wanted, and the profit margins in small-scale, retail-based delivery services simply weren't sustainable enough for someone starting out. But it remains one of the clearest pieces of evidence in my own portfolio of an entrepreneurial mindset actually being tested under real conditions.
What "Fail Fast, Learn Fast" Actually Meant Here
A mistake isn't proof that you're failing at life — it's actual evidence that you're trying and thriving in the first place. It shouldn't be feared; it should be expected, and prepared for. My delivery business gave me real, expensive lessons in partnership dynamics, operations, systems, digitalization, and cash flow management — lessons no course could have taught me nearly as fast or as permanently.
The more I exposed myself to failures like this one, the less I actually experienced them as failure in the traditional sense. They became data. Expensive data, but data nonetheless — the kind that shaped every business decision I made afterward, including how I eventually built and priced my bookkeeping services.
To know more about my services, writings — connect with me here — here's my website: https://www.kylenelsonomac.com/
Mahal na mahal kita. Mahal na mahal ka ng Diyos. Faith without action is Fiction.