Looking through the list, it seems to me like a good 90% of these (if not more) can be summarised as "lack of product-market fit", meaning that they blew their money on building something that nobody wants.
Anyone notice anything else standing out?
Anyone notice anything else standing out?
We should talk about nuances of why startups failed. Otherwise, "lack of product market fit" is just jargon for "we failed." Of course, we already know they failed. And since they are startups, they probably didn't fail with millions in revenue.
It tells you that they might have had a great team and great technology but had no clue how to sell it. Selling being something that the technology crowd loves to hate (myself included) it really drives home that marketing really does matter.
I'm not sure it makes sense to separate a concept like product-market fit from a concept like "correct" pricing. Changing the price point significantly may dramatically affect the market you're aiming at and the expectations of that market. Your product might have mass appeal but only as a casual/impulse purchase (typical mobile app). Your product might have only niche appeal but to the right market of people who appreciate it, it could be worth a fortune (original works by famous artists sometimes sell for more money than most of us will earn in a lifetime). To make things more challenging, it can also be relatively difficult to test different pricing levels.
When you introduce new products or services the market may or may not buy them, it's very difficult to predict beforehand. If your product is disruptive enough the market won't even exist, so you'll have to create it. If you fail it will be easy to blame it on "lack of product-market fit" but that will just be obvious. What else did fail? Why weren't these products able to create market demand?
IMHO comparing some of these ideas to the iPhone is a copout. As a kid I watched Inspector Gadget and saw Penny's "computer book" and wanted one instantly. When I was older I watched Star Trek and they all had PADD (sp?) devices that were a large screen with no keyboard. iPhone wasn't a revolutionary new idea for which there was no demand... its just that Apple knew that the time was right and that they could technically pull it off. They certainly didn't just engineer the iPhone on a wing and a prayer hoping that they might figure out a business plan one day.
This also applies to Blackberry and Nokia, but they failed miserably. The reason why we don't see them on this list it's because they were well established companies, and they could afford failure. That's the main difference with a startup, you pull off a Maemo, a Newton or a Virtual Boy and that's it, you are done. And let's not forget about the ROKR E1. You make it look like the iPhone's success was a very predictable and obvious thing, but just take a look at the reviews from 2007.
Not so much on this list, but one I've heard repeatedly for Bay Area startups.
I know there's a lot of grumbling on here when sales teams promise products that aren't built yet, but I'd rather build a product with an actual end-user case than a product with a hypothetical customer that no one may ever end up using. (It's also the reason I hate "stealth" startups -- your idea isn't unique, and if you think your competitive advantage is the element of surprise instead of implementation then you're in for a bad time.)
Any other engineers in the same boat?
I'm heartened by this autopsy.io site, hoping it grows, as it can be a place where failure can be reviewed and lessons can be learned, directly from the horses' mouths, so to speak. Failure gets swept under the rug too much, and I think we're seeing a bit of shifting in that area, to start acknowledging it publicly.
I have met 2 of the founders in this list personally, and was a bit surprised by the stories - not entirely, there's nothing earth-shattering in the details - but still surprised to see the shutdowns.
Lack of traction comes from poor focus on customers — whether that's marketing, feedback, or strategy. Without that pure focus on your paying customers you can't iterate and create a great product.
You can hate lemonade, but can still make money selling it.
As soon as they need to do the boring work (IE: 90% of the hard work involved in any business), interest is lost and they want to quit.
I call these people employees because they aren't willing to do what it takes to build and maintain a business.
(FYI: I'm one of those listed as "we weren't in love with the idea/market")
Most people spend most of their time working for somebody else, and most of them at the jobs they don't care for.
That's why when people win a lottery, the first thing they do is quit and do something they actually like - eat, travel, party, drive a nice car, sail, whatever. Almost none of them stay at their shitty job.
I can understand that many people working for McDonalds hate their job, but it's no risky task, just quick money.
However, it's the thousand little details that go into gaining that traction in the face of diverse challenges that are probably more interesting if we're looking at this as a learning exercise. Why did a business that could have gained enough traction to succeed actually fail before that point? What could the leadership of that business have known earlier or done differently to change their fate?