25 Best Startup Failure Post-Mortems of All Time

At least for Xmarks, the post-mortem seems to have spurred a turnaround. The pledge drive mentioned in the article has been set aside pending a 100% purchase:

> I’m pleased to announce that we’re in the final stages of completing a sale of Xmarks to a new owner who is 100% committed to keep our great browser sync service running smoothly.

http://blog.xmarks.com/?p=2007

(A truly fantastic and indispensable service, allowing you to use any browser at any time and have all the native bookmarks synced across browsers and OSes. I am one of many who wouldn't mind paying a fee somewhere between Pinboard.in and Evernote.)

Ouch... I don't know what to do. I've been going so long it seems normal to me that my startup is ugly and crappy. I'm a single founder, I procrastinate a bunch, and I had to get an outside job to pay my patent lawyers. I regularly go weeks without doing anything at all on my business because of all the other pressures on me. I started in 2004 and I still haven't launched. I keep thinking about how much better my stuff will be than anything that has existed so far, but man I get discouraged.

I have quit multiple times, but somehow I don't think I could go on without the hope that one of my businesses will someday thrive. I try working on other things, but I always come back to this one business idea that I believe with all my being to be a good idea if I can just get it going.