Why the name
The name comes from a line by Samuel Beckett in a book much darker than the posters suggest. I kept it because it describes how I work: try something, measure it honestly, keep what works and try again.
The top line is a scribble.The top line redraws itself differently every time you press Fail again. The line underneath never changes.
"Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better."
The line
Samuel Beckett published Worstward Ho in 1983. It is a short prose piece and nobody would call it easy reading.
The line everyone knows turns up a few short paragraphs in.
The honest reading
Read past the famous line and it gets darker quickly. Within a few lines better has turned into worse, and the rest of the book tries to make a handful of bare images worse still. Beckett wrote about failure as the condition every artist works in.
So I should be exact about what I borrow. Beckett did not mean any of this as business advice. What I take from it is smaller and more practical: a failed attempt does not end the work and the next one can fail more precisely as long as someone wrote down what went wrong the first time. The two words I lean on most sit in the middle of the line: No matter. You note the miss and go again.
The loop
The same four steps run through a marketing plan, an AI rollout and a workshop day.
Decide what needs to change, what success looks like and the point where we stop.
Try the approach inside the team on an ordinary working day.
Compare what happened with what we expected and close the routes that did not work.
Write the approach down and teach it to the team so the next round starts better.
In practice
A word like fail makes some boards nervous, which is fair when it is their budget. In practice it means small and cheap tests before any big commitment and a record that shows what didn't work as clearly as what did.
The Marketing + AI Audit turns what you already do into a short list of moves in order of priority. The guarantee is plain: full refund if nothing is actionable.
Marketing + AI AuditIn the CMO role the first month ends with a short list of hypotheses. The second tests them on a small budget, and the third keeps what worked and stops what didn't.
Fractional CMOI launch one workflow, watch where the team drops it and fix that before the next one. The test is whether people still use it after I have stepped back.
Chief AI OfficerQuestions
Probably not. Within a few lines the passage slides from better to worse, which is an odd place to look for a motto. The motivational reading came decades later from people who quoted the line on its own. I borrow the words anyway and I say so.
It means the opposite of betting the budget on one big idea. Each idea is tested small and cheaply first with a stop point we agree before anything starts, and the money only goes behind what survives the test and still makes sense once the numbers are in front of the leadership team.
Because the name tells you what to expect long before anyone signs anything. Some attempts won't land, and when that happens you will hear about it from me first, because a name that says so up front is a lot harder to hide behind later.
It stands for Fail Again. Fail Better. That is the name of my company in Ljubljana, FAFB, d.o.o., and it comes from the line Beckett published in 1983.
Tell me where your company stands and what you want to change. I read every message myself.
Anže FrantarWrite or call in English, Slovenian, Croatian or Serbian.
Or write to anze@failagainfailbetter.com, or call +386 40 191 468.
