Slashdot Mirror
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.
Looking at all those sites reminds me of the 90's all over again. Silly sounding site names with silly business models IMO .....
You're messin' with my Zen Thing, man.....
where will the founder explain how it died?
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Many entrepreneurs wait too long before calling in a business person to watch over the financial aspects and business goals of the company.
If you're thinking of launching your own company... it's worth scanning the list to see if any of these potential crises are brewing in your setup.
I thought the whole point was to jump in head-first and just hope the thing gets bought by an aquisitions team from an established company or pull all the copper out of the walls on your way out and end up breaking even (and therefore having employed yourself for a year or three.)
Someone had to do it.
You'll Totally Believe Why These Startups Failed
Was it because they were in the business of generating clickbait headlines?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Slashdot - news for nerds, "got bought by dice.com"
Did the startups fail because they relied on click bait titles but no content? I don't read articles or even summaries with click bait titles.
Just looking at some of the reasons for failure, I see a potential problem:
"WhatsApp for customer service"
"Tinder for jobs"
"Flash sales for toddlers"
I understand it's the '10s now, and companies can start up with an AWS account and big enough credit card limit, but it seems to me like the primary reasons for failure are (1) just a stupid idea that has no way to make money or gain customers, and (2) oversaturation and copying of "successful" companies' business plans or apps. That's one thing that hasn't changed since the 90s -- the only difference is that the companies get to hang around longer because they aren't blowing 6 figures on Sun servers and colo charges.
The offline analogue would be the frozen yogurt shop or cupcake bakery that have popped up in recent years. Nothing wrong with either, but I have seen so many of them come and go, and I feel bad because I know why. I'm sure most of those business owners read some article or listened to their friends describing the ultra-high margins to be made in the yogurt business, or living their dream of being a cupcake baker. They probably had visions of hordes of people descending on their perfectly-located shop and emptying their wallets on the counter. So, they quit their job, cash in their 401(k) and invest 6 figures to open up. Six months later, they're gone. The reason I feel bad is this -- sure, people make their own decisions and stuff, but after they've lost everything in a disastrous business venture, most peoples' lives are going to be significantly harder than if they hadn't wasted all that money. It's even worse if the owner is just a franchisee -- then the franchisee is getting rich off of the deal too.
The problem would appear to be that(unlike a real autopsy) they are working on the assumption that the guy who incorrectly took the gamble that the company would be a success and who(whether through their own effort, or because of outside circumstances, or both) flew it into the ground, is a reliable source of information on why it crashed.
Sometimes, this is likely to be true. They were there, they may have identified the problem at the time but been unable to solve it, or identified it in retrospect. In other cases, though, it's fairly likely that not knowing enough about what causes companies to fail is one of the reasons that the company failed, and the person who oversaw the failure is a really poor judge of what happened.
April 2014 Stipple: tag people, places, and objects in an image - “We had turned on revenue, but did not scale fast enough. We were not yet profitable,” Stipple Founder and Chief Executive Ray Flemings said.
Businesses shouldn't have to scale fast to succeed. You can grow a small business into a bigger business, as long as you aren't funded by people who are expecting to make a quick buck.
Imagine you're a venture capitalist. If you invest in a start-up, and it succeeds you can double your money in 1-2 years. If the startup folds, 9 times out of 10 it can be sold off for about what you invested into it. Sure the employees aren't going to get anything for the year the wasted there, but the equipment and parts of the business is usually worth something.
So if you can almost always make money or break even by investing, waiting 2 years, then either pulling out or reaping the rewards, then you'd be stupid not to serially invest in startups and let thousands of them collapse.
I believe this is what is meant by "did not scale fast enough". That a business must turns huge profits in short time for VCs to stick around. I've been part of a few startups that have had the plug pulled on them, even though it seemed like to me there was something worth salvaging. I later learned some of the economics of VC money and how the goals of investors are sometimes in contradiction of the goals of a small owner-operator business.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
"Didn't get on front page of Slashdot soon enough"
Starthead: "We were naive idiots"
Everybody starts out in the same boat. The smart, however, learn from their mistakes and keep trying until they find the way to make it work.
So.. Go out there and know that your experience makes you less naïve, just don't make the same idiotic mistakes again, and this time you will have a better chance at success.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
My first thought was that AdKeeper should be on the list, but apparently that turkey is still flying, albeit with what looks like a different business model.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I've seen two quasi-startups go down the tubes from the inside.
One company had some very clever ideas, but were chronically incapable of making reliable hardware, or of making software that worked. They had no internal procedures to track what they were making, what it was supposed to do, or how they knew it worked. Too many releases were "we have to ship something to keep from losing what little credibility we still have".
Another company tried to reinvent itself after its prime business peaked and then started to implode. The idea we tried to develop wasn't commercially uninteresting, but we had major focus issues. What, exactly, do we want to do? Who is going to buy it? For how much? Having owned our old industry we weren't very good at competing with others in our new industry.
Both companies had issues with ineffectual leadership, flavour-of-the-month development, and business decisions made to help friends rather than make money. Both were broadsided by external developments that eventually rendered their products commercially irrelevant.
...laura
Everybody starts out in the same boat. The smart, however, learn from their mistakes and keep trying until they find the way to make it work. So.. Go out there and know that your experience makes you less naÃve, just don't make the same idiotic mistakes again, and this time you will have a better chance at success.
Or they realize this is not for them. I couldn't be an artist or athlete or salesman or race car driver. Ok technically I could be a better one, but only because I'm so abysmally poor the only way is up. You know how we can read a description and start making all kinds of plans and sketches on how we'd build that? The guys with real economic talent, they're making a whole different sort of plans and sketches like who can you sell it to, what's the key selling features, what's the price points, how to you reach the market, how can you bring costs down, turnaround up, how do you grow the business.
And yes I know sales and marketing are generally loathed around here, but engineers often want to build "neat" products in ways the customers don't really see or care about. Or maybe he would if he ever knew your product existed, much less bought it. And don't say "go viral", honestly how often do you really spam your friends with what products or services you use? There's a few exceptions in social media where you invite people into a network or to play games with you but those are the rare exceptions. You don't talk about the brand of dental floss you use.
I'm not doing a small startup again, you need many roles that overlap and I'm more a specialist than a generalist. Maybe if it had twenty people, at least ten but not two or three or five. Enough at least that they could dedicate me to building whatever will be cash cow and not dealing with well... everything else. There's so many odds and ends you need to keep a company running that you don't notice working for a big company, on the plus side there's generally less meetings but there's still a lot of overhead that go away on random crap.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
We were running out of money. (Why? Dunno, I was just coding my ass off.)
You answered that question yourself:
We had grown from 5 guys in a old Victorian house on a side street, to a company with two offices and over 70 employees.
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