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I’ve been building a database of successful companies (starterstory.com)
184 points by patwalls on Sept 21, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 38 comments
5 years ago, after failing with a startup idea and being rejected from YC, I started interviewing founders with the hopes of learning what it takes to find a good idea and build a successful business.

I posted these case studies online (started as a side project) and eventually it turned into a business, and started making enough money for me to go full time on it (starterstory.com).

For the last 5 years I’ve been collecting data for each company we interview, such as revenue, startup costs, age of the company, gross margin, what channels they used to grow, and a ton more.

I’ve put all of this into a searchable, sortable, filterable database and I wanted to get HN’s opinion on the tool, and if you find the data / information useful? Also, would love to hear what other data points you think we should be collecting, or features we should add!

The tool is built with Rails, Postgres database, search functionality using Elasticsearch, and it’s hosted on Heroku.




Don't just record successful companies. You can't figure out what actually matters if you don't compare to failed companies.

If ten successful companies do something, you'll think it's a good thing to do. But what if one hundred failed companies do it, too?


I have come across this website that interviews failed founders. Looks like nthey pivoted to now doing both failed and successful but they def. started focussing on failed founders:

https://www.failory.com/

https://www.failory.com/graveyard


> Don't just record successful companies. You can't figure out what actually matters if you don't compare to failed companies

Quite. Trying to reverse-engineer start-up success this way has more than a whiff of cargo cult about it.


Good call, I could add this as a tag / make it filterable as some of the companies we've done case studies on have since failed, pivoted, or been acquired. Adding this to the backlog.


somebody can probably find the real story better than I can. Back in World War 2, the B29 Bomber would go out on long flights but not all of them returned. Of the ones that returned, they saw the hauls were full of bullet holes, so they kept adding armor to the haul and kept losing planes. By focusing on the planes that were not coming back, it turned out the problem was holes in wings - planes were surviving the holes in hauls.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias


Look up Abraham Wald, e.g. https://medium.com/@penguinpress/an-excerpt-from-how-not-to-...


This!

Stories of successful companies are of very limited use. Stories of how companies failed is of tremendous value.

"Make your own mistakes, not somebody else's."


This is one of the primary points of the book "The Halo Effect."


This is why I suggested I think on this forum for Jessica Livingston to make a follow-up to Founders at Work called Fuckups at Fail. Well not that because you can't stock it. But basically. A catalog of failures. Give me an intimate idea of what success is like, yes by all means, but also what failure is like. And the volume. In detail, so like tell me the blow-by-blow tragedy, like when the founder shits his pants in a meeting with VC's, at that point I'm fine with an abridged version. Nobody talks about that, tell me.

Like also all this self-faith is generally misplaced. They always tell you to believe in yourself, come on. Before I embarked on the algorithms and AI research in 2009 as the only hope for my future, put all my eggs in that basket out of desperation, I analyzed NBA player salaries, heights, and income in-depth. So my hypothesis is only people who can get into the NBA should go all-out training for basketball. Everybody else should treat it as a pass-time, and not dream about it, like set their alarm for when they're dreaming about it, anything. Muggsy Bogues can't get a rebound unconditionally. I played against an superior basketball, better ball-handling better shooting better everything "just better" as my brother described the people who made the basketball team in Berkeley High. Just better. Didn't matter a fuck, I was 6'2", which in practice in Chile means gigantic, blocked his shots got every rebound, won 10-0. Infinite mulligans. Height. Basically comes down to how tall you are.

So the NBA, which is tied to the sports industry, is essentially a tournament where everybody buys in, and the winner gets all the buy in. So the shitty thing is telling you you can make it, for example by putting Muggsy Bogues up as an example of a great player, always bragging the short players, cut the shit. It's all a ruse to get suckers, meaning short players who think they can win, to buy in to a tournament. Stealing basically. Dude Muggsy Bogues I think can't dunk. 5'5"? I couldn't even dunk at 6'2" and I was the tallest player on the best basketball team. I could reach the rim and then a tiny bit. Muggsy Bogues had to clear 9 more inches of vertical to reach the rim, not even dunk. I could squat like 300 pounds, and I also had the same height jump for both legs, because I did track and competed nationally. Man, get real. Fucking trampoline. They had special effects in the 1920's, you think they can't bullshit in the 1980's? Like falsify that shit? Who would accuse you? Only Daniel Cussen, in 2022.

People put dogshit on the news 60 minutes per hour, it doesn't stop. Counterfactual shit nonstop. Like the best is to read headlines and nothing else. Thomas Jefferson said that, the American Federal Government has that available publicly, if you read through the millions of pages of crap before it. Peer through the window at the newspapers in the newspaper dispenser, never buy in. Window-shopping and that's it. Like the kid saying "Extra! Extra! Napoleon invading Spain!" That's the news. Town crier. That's it. Layman doesn't know shit, no access, why would he ever get an inside scoop on anything? He wouldn't! Nobody would tell him!

Like I by this point stopped reading the articles on this forum, like I just can't, it's just rape, everrybody wants me to share a needle with them I just can't, I know I'll get asked for cookie "consent" (which means incoming rape), sorry I just can't. I just base my posts on reactions to the articles, and divine what I can, and if I fuck up die tragically without complaint. There's traps, like startups (not YC) getting the article points (people milk points, it's a points system points systems either get promoted into being hacked, or demoted into not being worthwhile to track, very hard to stay in between). So like articles on this site, know people hate hearing the word "consent" just seeing it anywhere then you have to read a contract that is dry sterile and abusive, whereas you were invited to read something juicy, actionable and beneficial.

Like you know what would be fun? Swap company's advertising and consent forms. Put the consent forms on the billboards, and the advertising only when you are convinced you want to buy the product...like that ad can come last to rematar like bring in the kill that has read those long consent forms and said "yeah this product makes sense it's not complete shit with no rights and endless responsibilities for me, and infinite rights and no responsibilities for the contract writer". That's a marketing experiment, why don't companies try it? Yeh.

Like OK know a tiny bit about Napoleon, that's worth your time. But don't read jack shit. Nothing. It sucks. No news. History, on the other hand, once heads have cooled conquest accepted, like that is worthwhile. Russian leaders actually do that, they draw parallels (Joseph Dugashvili aka Stalin) between Bolshevik Commissars and the Chaplains in Oliver Cromwell's army. Actually read. Even the tsar, that guy actually played chess. Was painted drawing chess against his best friend, whom he kept in poverty, and I guess both were losing, and then there was a heart attack, of the best friend of course, not the Tsar. That would lead to a state emergency. Best friend instead gets a lavish funeral, finally. Yeah then yeah, then the Tsar coughs up the money or gets assassinated. Ivan the Terrible, I think, from memory? The autocrator, as he's called internally. Meaning a ruler who cannot be corrupted or manipulated, and yes he fucks like crazy, and yes he spends crazy money on crazy things, but that fucking and that spending have a bottleneck of one man. That's the upside. The thing is what about his sons and his sons's sons? That's where shit breaks down, in a large country. Privilege. Nobility. And inbreeding. Ends up with failures, inescapably, people thinking they can do what they just can't. Like I don't try riding at the races, too tall too heavy. Played basketball a bit but never invested because obviously it was not a good investment. Actually determined the cut-off--it's all about the cut-off.

For basketball, the cut-off is six feet ten inches of height for whites, six feet nine inches of height for blacks. There's some forms of racism in the NBA, it happens, you have to judge a book by its cover, it's just not anti-Black racism. Like there's friction for Asian players (Lin-sanity) but that's just because they have to start somewhere, pretty hard to tell people . If a doctor tells a kid that will be his adult height, invest all the way. Hence my bet, I will bet all-out in the tournament, but only if I will win. Not a question of luck. A question of adult height (in basketball). Strict. Gotta know the cut-off.

Brings me back to the bigger picture of failure. Like what happens if you fail, what happens in eg prison (which I should visit) and wards (which I should visit) and on the street (there I do talk to everybody, especially people nobody talks to like cops and beggars).

I bought Founders at Work. I asked for it to be shipped to a friend in America, and then got it brought down to Chile. That's work. That's demand.

I want Fuckups at Fail.


A lot of commenters here are rightly pointing out survivorship biais.

Im even more concerned with the measure of « success » employed.

It seems that the only metric reported here is monthly revenue, which by itself can tell you if a project is further than the idea on a PowerPoint stage, but cannot tell you anything about meaningful success (at a very basic level revenue is not profit, and a few months data don’t tell much).


And there are very profitable companies with failed founders (diluted, expelled, leverage failures, dot dot dot). And failed companies with successful founders (cashed out at IPO, WeWork’s Adam Neumann is a billionaire, dot dot dot)


This is a great utility for inspiration. I wonder at its utility beyond that. I'm primarily concerned about rigour. How much is story and how much is study? What details are missing that completely change the context?

For example, a case study of Bill Gates takes on a different light when the story includes how his father was a licensed attorney, that they worked together and appeared to have a close relationship. Surely that's an important detail. Secure family attachments, let alone the resources of knowledge and money, must factor in to the success of individuals.


Isn't this a massive case of survivorship bias?


Yes but we don't solely cover VC funded startups with success rates of <5%.

We cover a lot of small & bootstrapped businesses, e-comm, agencies, side hustles, etc that IMO believe anyone can start. This isn't the stereotypical list of successful companies ala Airbnb, Uber, Dropbox.


404: https://www.starterstory.com/stories/planndu


But a $1/million year company ignores profit though. Easy to make revenue at a loss. The Uber losses model will not work unless you have a lot of VC backing.


gross margin is included in the reports


Love this idea! And the way you have formatted the website and organized each business with its own section makes it super easy to navigate and read. Thank you for sharing this! I think this is an important site to help entrepreneurs learn more about business.


>How I Started An Escort Service At 21 That Now Generates $200K/Month

So pimping is a startup now?


It probably has a nice React front end and Stripe for payment processing, so that would put it in the startup bucket :)


Yikes, people still start new projects with Stripe after all the horror stories here on HN? In my mind they are on PayPal's level of broken fraud prevention by now.


"Nobody goes there, it's too crowded."


Are there vendors other than stripe and paypal that provide online payment processing services?


Always was.


There’s also the successful side hustles that don’t feel comfortable sharing financial details, whether it’s because of competition, being seen as braggadocio, or maybe because you feel the business will grow even more next year.


I love the case studies. This is a massive treasure trove of insights and I bet a lot of hard work! Incredible work. Thanks for making it all free, too!

Curious: how are you making revenue on it — mainly the memberships?


Reading this initially I thought it was some crossover between a parody and an April Fool's day joke - some 23 year old with 3 companies, the first of which was founded and sold in 2014.


This is neat. I wonder if there's a way to cull the Idea list, though? There's a lot to go through at the moment, and some entries are listed twice (i.e. Blog).


Ah yes, been meaning to fix that. Was planning on cleaning it up and also adding a typeahead / search function. Thanks for the feedback.


Always weird to see these lists of other people's success stories being turned into its own success story.


It looks nice, but.... Failed companies would be much more interesting. Everyone knows the successful companies.


I think both are important, but I appreciate the feedback.

I know there are a 'zeitgeist' of typical SV successful companies (Uber, Dropbox, etc) but we actually cover a ton of companies you've probably never heard of. We cover a lot of side hustles, side projects, agencies, e-commerce, and more too.


Wish to see failedstory.com exists to teach me about how to not build a startup.


Failure stories suffer from an infinite amount of things that can go wrong. I never found "stories of failure" compelling, because in many cases I'm on a different path and wouldn't have done the same mistakes anyways.


It sounds good. But what's the line between success and failure?


For those interested in a parallel perspective, this also exists:

https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/


Also Failory, the same business as OP but with the opposite angle: https://www.failory.com/graveyard




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