“Our empirical model indicates that entrepreneurs who succeeded in a prior venture (i.e., started a company that went public) have a 30% chance of succeeding in their next venture. By contrast, first-time entrepreneurs have only an 18% chance of succeeding and entrepreneurs who previously failed have a 20% chance of succeeding.”

1) It Prepares You for How Much Work Is Involved

“Before you get profitable and establish yourself, you’re basically walking dead and you have to realize it’s more of a marathon than a sprint.”

2) It’ll Teach You What to Look for in a Cofounder

“Fights between founders are surprisingly common. About 20% of the startups we’ve funded have had a founder leave. It happens so often that we’ve reversed our attitude to vesting.”

3) It’ll Show You How Flexible Your Ideas Need to Be

“Dogged determinedness will likely keep you from building the business that you could have built.”

4) It’ll Teach You the Importance of Passion

“I won’t get into all of the dynamics of the situation, but, in a nutshell, we had lost our spark and were letting our users down by not improving the product the way we should have.

“The team was burned out and we decided that it was time to find someone else to carry the torch.”

5) It’ll Show You How Little You Know About Money

“If you’re offering a free plan to your customers then expect to get around 98% or 99% of your customers on that plan. That means that you can only really bank on 1% or 2% of your total customers on the paying plan. In our experience this is true and other major players in the web app industry have agreed. This is about the industry average.”

Top Reasons Why Businesses Fail, misguided financial expectations often explain why companies call it quits.

• 82% Poor cash flow management skills/poor understanding of cash flow
• 79% Starting out with too little money.
• 77% Not pricing properly - failure to include all necessary items when setting prices
• 73% Being overly optimistic about achievable sales, money required and about what needs to be done to be successful.

Conclusion

“With every effort, I learned a lot. With every mistake and failure, not only mine, but of those around me, I learned what not to do. I also got to study the success of those I did business with as well. I had more than a healthy dose of fear, and an unlimited amount of hope, and more importantly, no limit on time and effort.

Even successful people often fail at first, so right now now is the perfect time to get those hiccups out of the way.

(http://particletree.com/features/5-reasons-to-create-your-first-startup-now/)