How We've Helped Over 3,000 People Find Job Opportunities And Improve Their Mental Health

Swagat Mohanty

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Published: January 17th, 2023

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Swagat Mohanty

Founder, FailTell

$1.1K

revenue/mo

Founders

Employees

FailTell

failtell.com

from Bhubaneswar, Odisha, India

started August 2020

$1,100

revenue/mo

Founders

Employees

Discover what tools recommends to grow your business!

Discover what books Swagat recommends to grow your business!

Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future Peter Thiel

Outliers: The Story of Success Malcolm Gladwell

The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuou... Eric Ries

Rework Jason Fried

Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Pur... Tony Hsieh

Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Tak... Simon Sinek

📗

The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business Whe... Ben Horowitz

Thinking, Fast and Slow Daniel Kahneman

Want more updates on FailTell? Check out these stories:

1. Our Profitable Website Helps People Overcome Failure [11K Users] (2021) ➜

This is a follow up story for FailTell. If you're interested in reading how they got started, published about 3 years ago, check it out here.

Hello again! Remind us who you are and what business you started.

I am Swagat Mohanty, co-founder of FailTell, which was started on August 4, 2020, with my friend Rahul Mohanty.

The COVID pandemic has caused an increase in issues such as stress, depression, anxiety, emotional challenges, and fear of failure among the general population. Despite being surrounded by others, it can be difficult to find someone to talk to and share our struggles with.

Our goal with FailTell is to create a space where people can share their experiences with failure and how they have overcome it, to have a more comprehensive understanding of the process and not just focus on success stories. We wanted to address these issues and reduce the stigma surrounding failure, so we created FailTell as a community for people to share their stories of overcoming failure and find role models.

In response to the pandemic, we have also launched FailTell 2.0, which includes additional services such as career mentoring. Our team includes career mentors with diverse backgrounds and expertise in various industries, as well as counselors, therapists, and life coaches. We strive to make our services accessible and affordable to everyone without compromising on quality.

Tell us about what you’ve been up to. Has the business been growing?

We started FailTell to share real-life stories of failure and struggles, to help people feel less alone, and to foster a more personal connection with others whose experiences they can relate to. We also offer a variety of customized services, including career guidance, mental health support, and emotional assistance, at affordable rates. Through our social media presence, we aim to keep people connected and updated with the latest stories and blogs We even narrate some of the real-life stories via our podcast channel named ‘The Failosophical Guy’.

Before our existence, people were more likely to encounter success stories than real-life accounts of challenges and failures. Even when they did come across such stories, which were rare due to the stigma attached to failure, they were hard to find all in one place. In addition, it can be difficult to find domain-specific experts to provide one-on-one guidance in unconventional fields like journalism, modeling, fashion management, and hotel management.

As a result, people may feel forced to pursue more conventional career paths without proper guidance. Quality therapy, counseling, and life coaching services are also often out of reach for many people due to cost, even though they may need such support.

We have built a network of over 17,000 users and 250 mentors and experts through our social media strategy, and have helped over 3,000 students find job opportunities. 87% of our users have reported improving their mental health after therapy sessions.

We also offer bulk services to educational institutions, coaching institutions, corporate entities, and small and medium-sized enterprises. In the future, we plan to conduct webinars and charge fees for them and have other exciting projects in the works.

What have been your biggest challenges in the last year?

The challenge we faced was finding affordable and reliable technology resources, including developers for our website.

Our website is built on the MERN stack and hosted on AWS. We use dockerization and Kubernetes to containerize the code and deploy it using AWS EKS. Our main expenses are the 3 server ECS configuration with Fargate as the compute engine and Amazon S3 for image storage. We also pay for database storage and hosting from Atlas.

Also, since we were already catering to an overcrowded market, there was this constant pressure to find our USP to stand out from all the big players in the market.

We have a 100% unique proposition considering the array of services we offer on the same platform. Individual services like Therapy and Counseling, Career Mentoring are the services in which the market is overcrowded. In the Mental Health space, we consider Cerebral, Yourdost, Amaha, and 1to1 Help as our competitors, and in the career mentoring space, we consider Mindler, and Coachhub as our competitors.

We are the only player in the market to provide all services in one platform to help one redesign one's personal and professional development holistically. Our most unique service is Failure Prism which connects people to their failure experiences and which has an objective to remove the stigma of failure among all.

Another major setback we faced was convincing people to share their stories of struggles, failures, and challenges, considering the stigma attached to the same in our country. Considering this, we included an option for users to give a story anonymously on the platform.

We also faced difficulties while scaling up overseas as we had a limited understanding of the customers’ needs in those geographies via the campus ambassadors we had hired from campuses abroad.

What have been your biggest lessons learned in the last year?

One thing to remember about entrepreneurship is that failure is not the end of everything, but rather the opportunity for a fresh start. You can't go down this road and not fail once or twice. You will be better off if you begin with the understanding that failure will occur along the path.

Failure is merely another lesson that helps you get back on track to achievement. There is never an ideal time to pursue your ambition and launch your own company. Life will throw barriers in your path, and fear will continue to convince you that "now" isn't the proper time. Set it all aside and take the leap!

What’s in the plans for the upcoming year, and the next 5 years?

Our mission is to create responsible and realistic social media for people belonging to all age groups and from all walks of life. We want people to fathom the depth of every process in life with a holistic view rather than just looking at the number of successful attempts.

We will consider our mission to be successful if we can build a community where people are open about the whole process which includes accepting both failures and successes.

Also, in 5 years, we aim to partner with more than 100 educational institutes and build a network of 2000+ counselors, therapists, life coaches, and career mentors. With a vision to serve more than a million people from all across the globe, we firmly believe we can make a difference in the world by offering a perfect balance of counseling, coaching, mentoring, professional development, and performance improvement, to help a larger population unleash their true potential and lead a more meaningful and happier life, along with a fresh perspective on failures, challenges, and hurdles.

In the future, we also aim to introduce personalized wellness programs, stress-buster games, and an online marketplace for courses to aid the overall growth of individuals.

What’s the best thing you read in the last year?

Start with Why by Simon Sinek- It is an A to Z on how leaders inspire people to take action.
The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick- This book is focused on startups that are bringing a new product or service to market
The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz- It's a brutally honest look at how difficult it is to run a business.
Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman- This is one of the best books for entrepreneurs since it deconstructs the psychology of decision making and judgement.

Advice for other entrepreneurs who might be struggling to grow their business?

Business concepts are worth very little on their own. If you want to create and run a successful firm, you must solve relevant challenges. In business, execution is everything.
Start before you're ready. If you wait until your product or service is perfect, someone else will do a better job of assisting your clients in solving their problems.
Rather than attempting to establish a firm and instantaneously develop your idea of what the company should be in the coming years, focus on setting and completing tiny incremental goals. Setting realistic goals and milestones is essential for long-term success.

Are you looking to hire for certain positions right now?

We are currently hiring web developer interns (skilled in MERN stack, GraphQL, Socket.io, and Azure) and marketing interns. Interested people can drop us a mail at hr@failtell.com, to know more.