(By "NEARLY made it" I mean projects that seemed to be gaining some traction in some way or another but failed. Maybe due to lack of time, founder dispute, patent troubles, etc)
1st day of launch Tomorrowbook received 5,000 search queries and about 10,000 on day 2 and 3 respectively and on day 4 we received about 250,000 queries. My only prior web experience was a webstore that receives about 40 visitors a day, so I thought with numbers like this out of the gate I would gain the attention of: media, VCs, anyone...
Needless to say, while I was happy with the early numbers/traction, traffic dramatically fell off. I am not even sure how I got those initial numbers having used Twitter and a (sorry excuse for a) press release to market. Even though I wrote the engine to use both Google Search API and Bing API neither MS or Google had any interest in talking to me about my project, and after a year I dropped the hosting and no one has heard of tomorrowbook.
I know how unrealistic it is to think I could come along and create a search engine that anyone will use over any pre-existing search engine, but I maintain the favicon search engine is a better user experience on phones/tablets than Google, Bing, Yahoo and it is better for domain owners because it forces users to actually visit the end website.
Overall it was a humbling experience but while most people would be afraid of such failure and give up, it has only encouraged me to keep swinging for the fences.
Do you still own the domain?
Because of the problems with funding and lack of promotion strategy all start-ups failed!
1. Founder of Onlines.ir (2005) — my first startup,with 300,000hits in first 48 hours / Dead — http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://onlines.ir
2. Founder of Zaxino(2006) — miniblog service / Dead — http://www.killerstartups.com/Web20/zaxino-com-get-a-mini-bl...
3. Founder of LandZo(2007) — a photosharing network / Dead
4. Founder of HostFinder.ir(2008) — the first hosting directory in Iran / Dead
5. Founder of Zajet(2009) — a social network to share anything / Dead — http://www.killerstartups.com/Web20/zajet-com-sharing-made-s... — http://www.startupwizz.com/2009/06/zajet-what-are-you-sharin... — http://www.webdevtwopointzero.com/sites/zajetcom/ — http://www.listio.com/web20/app/Zajet-1/
6. Founder of LifeDesktop(2010) — the first web-based life organizer — http://www.lifedesktop.com — http://www.killerstartups.com/Web-App-Tools/lifedesktop-com-... — http://www.webdevtwopointzero.com/sites/lifedesktop/ — http://sigalonwebapps.soup.io/post/116420479/LifeDesktop-com... — http://slydnet.com/web/lifedesktop-organiser-sa-vie-en-ligne...
7. Founder of Noolt(2012) — the mix of DMoz, Stackoverflow, Wiki and Digg / Dead