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You'll Totally Believe Why These Startups Failed
Nerval's Lobster writes: If you ever wanted a glimpse into what dooms startups, look no further than autopsy.io, a website that lists the reasons why many newborn tech firms imploded. The website offers entrepreneurs the ability to self-explain why their startup didn't quite make it; in a bid to separate real-life stories from entertaining fictions, the application form asks for a link to a blog post or medium article "that tells the story of the failure," along with the founder(s) Twitter handle and Crunchbase or Angel.co profile. Some of the reasons listed for failure are maddeningly opaque, such as UniSport's "for a number of reasons" or PlayCafe's "we didn't reach enough users." Others are bleakly hilarious; as the founders of Zillionears, self-billed as a "creative pre-sale platform for musicians," confessed: "People really didn't really LIKE anything about our product." If you're thinking of launching your own company, or you work for a wet-behind-the-ears startup, it's worth scanning the list to see if any of these potential crises are brewing in your setup.
no, most of these ideas are about as stupid as buying a Palm Pilot in the 90's and spending an hour a day inputting data into it to save an hour organizing your day. or they try to copy some existing business model under some cool hype and don't deliver
Spoken like someone who missed a lot of what Palm brought to the table at the time, and whose first PDA was an iPhone...
1.) Taking time to input data has always been a part of a pocket reference. If you were carrying around a Day Timer, you were doing data entry by hand to create your schedule. If you were carrying around a pocket Rolodex, you were adding contact names and numbers with a pencil. Palm took about the same amount of time at worst.
2.) Palm facilitated data entry by syncing with Outlook (for those who had existing data) or Hotsync Manager (for those who didn't) and allowing all of that data to be stored and backed up.
3.) It did seemingly trivial things like "sort alphabetically" - it's maddening to open a pocket phone book and be out of room to add a new person where they belong. Similarly, A Palm that was kept for 3-5 years (back then, they were, in fact, kept that long) was pretty close in cost to replacing a DayMinder annually - those things are NOT cheap.
4.) Alarms when things were coming up. A pocket calendar didn't chirp an hour before an event.
5.) Multiple calendar views. Wanted to see your paper calendar at a weekly level? Hope you bought it that way!
6.) Trading contact information by holding down the 'contacts' button and lining up the IR sensors. To this day, I've only seen weak attempts to recreate this - Bump, QR Codes, costly NFC tiles...nothing beat the simplicity of line up. hold one button. done.
Trivial as these things are to us now, the days of doing these tasks on paper saw them as a much bigger leap, because they were problems that went from 'unsolved' to 'solved', rather than 'solved' to 'optimized'. Also, keep in mind that battery life was measured in "weeks".......