Nothing Ventured, Nothing Gained
What happens when everything about an idea is right except the timing? Not because the idea is flawed, but because nothing around it is ready to catch it yet. That is the harder problem, and it gets talked about far less than it should.
Andy Bailey, co-founder of Blackline, spent four years building something with genuine belief behind it: development partners, sizeable networks, conversations with national and global governing bodies. And still, it never got off the ground. Not because anyone said no. Because no one said yes.
An idea that started on the sidelines
It started, as these things often do, somewhere ordinary. Andy’s son, four years old at the time, had become completely obsessed with rugby. Standing on the sidelines watching him play, Andy found himself asking a different question to the one everyone else around him seemed to be asking.
“I remember standing on the sidelines thinking, “Why is this so hard? Not just the game itself, but everything around it: the access, the coaching, the experience.” Rugby was struggling, really struggling, and it continues to struggle. But it wasn’t struggling because people don’t care; it was struggling because the experience just didn’t work anymore. So we asked a different question: not “How do you coach rugby to a high standard?” but “How do you help more kids enjoy playing the game?” And from that point on, everything clicked.”
Building COACH
From that question came COACH, a digital coaching experience built around a genuinely original idea: that play shouldn’t be the reward for learning, it should be the learning itself. Made accessible, gamified, opened up to everyone. On paper, it was a win for the whole sport.
We built a digital coaching experience called Coach that we genuinely believed could change the game. It wasn’t just an idea on paper, it had purpose, it had promise, and it would save the game from itself. Our development partners included Premiership players, totally involved, totally invested in its creation. We recruited two club CEOs who championed this future saviour of the game across their sizeable networks, and we had serious partnership conversations with national and global governing bodies. Every conversation felt like confirmation. We spent four years refining, reshaping, and talking to everyone in and out of the game, harvesting support, inside knowledge, and a future network of success. And the belief didn’t fade, if anything it just got stronger, because the idea was original. We weren’t just trying to improve coaching; we were reframing the whole thing.
When nothing breaks, but nothing moves
Everyone nodded. Everyone leaned in. Everyone said it made sense. And then, nothing happened.
We couldn’t get it off the ground. No funding, no pilot, no one willing to go first. And that is a strange place to be, because nothing had broken. The idea still made sense, the feedback was positive, but momentum just stopped. No one said “no” loudly; they just didn’t say “yes.” And that’s much harder to deal with, because you’re left sitting there thinking, “What did we miss? Were we not original enough, or were we too original?”
Ahead of the system
That’s the uncomfortable bit, because from the outside, it looked like it should have worked. But originality doesn’t just need a good idea; it needs the right conditions around it. And that’s often where things fall down.
COACH didn’t fail because the idea was wrong. It failed because we were asking people to back something that didn’t yet fit how the system worked. We were ahead of the infrastructure, ahead of the incentives, ahead of what people were ready to commit to.
That’s the thing about originality, it doesn’t just challenge the market, it challenges the people inside the market. And that’s where most ideas stall, not because they’re bad, but because they require change that people aren’t quite ready to make.
What this means for your business
COACH is a reminder that belief and evidence are not the same thing. Most original ideas don’t stall because they are bad. They stall because they ask people, and systems, to change before those systems are ready to. That is not a reason to stop backing original ideas. It is a reason to expect resistance that has nothing to do with whether the idea is right.
The question COACH leaves behind is not whether the idea deserved to work. It clearly did. It’s what you do next, when the idea is right and the moment isn’t. We pick that up in episode four: how to reshape, how to rebound, and how to turn failure into fuel for what comes next.
This article is drawn from episode three of the Blackline Originals podcast. Find all episodes, at blacklinecreative.co.uk/originals.
