
Startup Failure Post-Mortems - alatkins
https://www.cbinsights.com/blog/startup-failure-post-mortem
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wimagguc
Awesome collection! One thing that strikes me is that there are quite a few
CEOs who try to blame others for the failure. You read things like:

* "my competitor ... is infamous for its anti-competitive behaviour", * "every time we have any meaningful growth, it's coupled with the immediate attention of the record labels"

Taking responsibility should be the first thing for any CEO to be good at.

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xivzgrev
I agree. Some of these post mortems are insightful but some are lame like
prism. "Welp we built a cool product, learned content distribution is tough,
and failed to achieve growth. The end" But why is it tough? What it sounds
like was that prism didn't provide a useful enough experience for enough
people to change their old habits of consumption.

Also there was a hotel top 10 one that was odd. They couldn't grow because
they were priced out by large competitors. But any ranking / aggregator site
should crush end providers in seo. I work for a financial services companies
and lead aggregators dominate seo because it's inherently more beneficial for
a consumer to see a bunch of choices than one provider. I imagine its a
similar story for hotels.

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tim333
There's a lot of competition in SEO as well. Googling "best London hotels" the
list is dominated by Tripadvisor, the Telegraph, Time Out, Expedia etc. All
long established, well known and in Tripadvisor's case (3 of the top 4) very
good in my opinion.

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ksdale
I'm surprised by how many of them blame their inability to scale on a lack of
money. In some cases access to capital is the root problem, but in a lot of
cases it's just evidence that your business won't work. Most of them sound
like they are positive they could have succeeded with another round of
funding, which I suppose is to be expected from CEOs but doesn't seem like it
could possibly be accurate in all these cases.

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floppydisk
Speaking from personal experience, I think a lot of them end up in the boat of
having just enough paying customers that the idea looks viable but not getting
enough long term traction to go from niche product surviving on raised capital
to self-sustaining. Riding the initial public interest wave a bunch of people
signup and the revenue projections look really good which lets the company go
raise more capital to keep going, but over time, the company taps out their
customer base and their revenue growth flatlines and ultimately they can't
jump from niche product running on capital to self sustaining.

A lot of these postmortems, I think end up with CEOs looking at metrics,
especially the early growth metrics, -- and they want to be successful, most
of the time it's their baby -- and seeing enough interest to make them think
they're close. Ergo, the "only if we had more time/money" postmortems.

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jlukecarlson
It seems like the post-mortems from people outside the founders circle, like
early employees, competitors or investors are more honest and realistic about
the factors that led to the company's demise. Founders sometimes try to
reframe their failure to make themselves look better. Poor market fit, not
enough money, etc can be legitimate reasons but don't completely get to the
heart of why a company didn't succeed.

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autopov
Is it time for @pud to resurrect fuckedcompany.com?

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eropple
I bought "unicorngrill.com" out of a half-assed idea to do something similar.
Haven't had time yet, but every time I see something like this, I'm tempted.

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arethuza
halfbakery has been around for a long time:

[http://www.halfbakery.com/](http://www.halfbakery.com/)

e.g. One legged self balancing bar stool:

[http://www.halfbakery.com/idea/One-
legged_20Bar_20Stool#1455...](http://www.halfbakery.com/idea/One-
legged_20Bar_20Stool#1455487807)

~~~
eropple
I know about halfbakery, I'm thinking more in the abjectly "look how
completely fucked all this is" sense. There have to be a lot of awesome
stories that are not being told.

