Most people think success is a straight line.

You have an idea. You execute. It works. You scale. Millions in your account!
Sadly, that’s the version people post about. The version that gets the LinkedIn likes and the Forbes features and the podcast invites.

That’s also not how it happens.

After building BDX MEDIA into a multi-million dollar, award-winning agency with offices in Leipzig, New York, and Los Angeles, I can tell you exactly what the path actually looked like.

That’s 13 attempts.
13 times I had to start over, reassess, and figure out what came next.

And now: BDX MEDIA.

Success from the outside looks effortless. From the inside, it looks nothing like that.

It’s sleepless nights and wrong turns and teams you build and lose and rebuild. It’s 12 years of trying things that don’t work, learning something unexpected from each one, and carrying that into the next attempt.

What I understand now that I didn’t at the start:

• None of it was wasted. Every failed record label taught me how creative culture actually works. Every fashion brand attempt taught me how to speak the language of designers and artists. Every event I promoted taught me how audiences move and how energy builds. The skills transferred even when the ventures didn’t.
• Conviction isn’t about certainty. It’s about persistence. You don’t need to be sure it’s going to work. You need to be willing to keep going even when you’re not sure. That’s the whole thing.
• The number of attempts is the strategy. Most people quit after two or three failures because they interpret failure as evidence they’re on the wrong path. In reality, each failure is just data. You’re narrowing down. You’re getting closer.
• 13 tries to find the real thing. Not two. Not five. Thirteen. And that’s not a failure rate, that’s a search process. One that works, if you don’t stop.

The reality behind what looks easy. There’s a version of BDX Media that people see now.
What they don’t see is the apple farm. The unpaid photography gigs I did, hoping something would come of it. The only difference between the people who get there and the people who don’t is that the ones who get there didn’t stop at 6 or 10.

What This Means For You

You might be reading this from inside a corporate job right now.

Maybe you’re a VP of Brand, or a senior marketer, or someone who’s good at what they do but wondering if this is all there is. Maybe you’re looking at founders and entrepreneurs thinking they had something you didn’t have when they started.

They didn’t.

What they had was a list (a long one) and the willingness to keep adding to it.

Here’s what I’d ask you to do:

1. Write down everything you’ve tried that DIDN’T work. Don’t edit it. Don’t judge it. Just write the list. You’ll be surprised how much you’ve actually attempted and how much you’ve quietly learned from each one.
2. Write down everything you’ve tried that DID work even partially. What did you build? What doors opened? What do you know now that you didn’t before? The skills don’t disappear just because the outcome didn’t land the way you planned.
3. Ask yourself what you’re proud of that nobody sees. The late nights. The pivots. The moments where it would have been easier to stop and you didn’t. Those decisions are the actual foundation of everything that comes next.

Why it Matters

I share this list not because I think failure is something to celebrate for its own sake. But because the version of success that’s seen online is always the “cleaned-up version”.

No one’s talking about the 13 attempts it took prior. Success is earned. Slowly. With a lot of wrong turns and even more lessons.

If you’re in the middle of something hard right now, a launch that isn’t landing, a moment where nothing is working the way you thought it would… you’re not behind.

You’re in the middle. And the middle is exactly where it’s supposed to feel this hard.

Keep going!

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Community & Events

• Apr 24 // After Hours Run | Leipzig 🇩🇪 – Run your pace. Find your people. ✨
• Apr 29 // BDX Creator Rooftop Meetup | Los Angeles 🇺🇸 – A rooftop evening with sunset views, a live DJ, drinks, and food. A space designed for real conversations with creators, founders, and operators who are actually building.
• May 4 // BDX Sports Marketing Summit | Hamburg 🇩🇪 – This talk explores the mechanics behind attention, loyalty, and cultural relevance in modern sports
• May 5-6 // OMR Conference | Hamburg 🇩🇪 – Thanks to our friends at OMR Isa Gardt & Philipp Westermeyer we have a 15% discount code: omr26-bdx

Thanks for catching up, I’ll see you next week.
– Benni

Stay Connected

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