Should you fail in building a community before building a successful one?

Building a successful community is no easy task, you have to devote time, learn and understand your goals really well. But most important thing of all is to fail and learn from mistakes. I have failed at building communities before, I learnt from them and built even better community every single time. Build, Learn and Iterate was my motto, and finally it was fruitful when I succeeded in building a community of 3000+ paid members. It was hard and challenging, but I succeeded after numerous failures. So I have been wondering what have other people experience in community building? Have you succeeded without failure? If so how did you learn and improve?