It means validate your idea quickly against real customers and do something else if they don't love it. Once you determine to do this, you find that many ideas you thought were great are total shite, so you fail fast because you don't do much development without validation. You are able to iterate through multiple concepts quickly until you arrive at one people love, and then you throw yourself behind it and get it built and get people paying.
The common mistake is to pick an idea out of your head, spend six months building it, and then find out nobody is willing to pay for that thing over the next six months after that.
Thats what fail fast means. Its the key to success.
I read the whole thing, but you lost credibility at the first sentence. It's a proven myth that a failing at a start-up is no indicator of success at your next start-up.
The only "predictor" of future success in any world is past success. Give me a successful person with any reasonable background, and I'd prefer them to a failure as the leader of a company.
I would suggest that failing at a startup and demonstrating that you've learned from that failure would be a strong indicator of success. There's so many common lessons people learn.
To be fair, keeping up to date with information and learning new things is a must for a entrepreneurship. You really cannot decide if it's garbage before reading it.
But on a side note, I think web related entrepreneurs should definitely stop wasting time Tweeting and Blogging about their development, and instead actually do development.
I hate this "fail fast" advice, and just about the only place I've heard it is from VCs, who (a) don't like slow success, and (b) don't mind failure as long as it is balanced with successes in their portfolio.
The problem with the advice is that it obscures two of the most important qualities that a startup needs: tenacity and adaptability.
Not fail fast, but more like know how to retool what you have into another business.
A friend of mine became a hugely successful used-laptop vendor because he learned the ropes of the industry while trying to liquidate the equipment of his failed business (he only had 20 laptops to sell and found the low prices buyers were offering for bulk used laptops vs the high street retail price for single units.)
If my current start up doesn't pan out, I have about 5 different business automation solutions I can take to the market .. or maybe even when it's successful ;-)
