You'll Totally Believe Why These Startups Failed 151
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.
The 90's all over again... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
the 90's had eyeballs. tens of millions of them.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
...and both had crazy-eyed but dumbassed/redundant/ill-conceived ideas by entrepreneurs whose sole business plan was to get bought-up by a Fortune 500 corp, then cash the hell out ASAP before said corp realized just how big of an unmanageable turkey they got.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
It's not just the idea that might be bad - look at this gem [examiner.com] from one of the founders of a doomed startup:
Don’t pay employees with cash (they aren’t passionate then)
It's not too hard to see why the platform never got built (one of the other things he complained about - platform never got built).
Re: (Score:2)
Actually, some good advice [medium.com] after all:
Growing up everyone told me I could be whatever I wanted to be.
...
That creativity that we were praised for in elementary school and that has become so central to the way we think of ourselves worthless.
We've raised a nation of people who were indoctrinated with the idea that they can do anything, or be anything that they want. We told them that their ideas were important. We lied.
Re: (Score:3)
We've raised a nation of people who were indoctrinated with the idea that they can do anything, or be anything that they want. We told them that their ideas were important. We lied.
I was misdiagnosed as being mentally retarded and spent my school years in Special Ed classes. Every time I blew out the evaluation exams on the genius side of the scale, my teachers called it a statistical fluke. If I'm in the Special Ed program, I must be an idiot. They told me as much. Of course, I never believed them. I had to drop out of school after the 8th grade before I could enter college as an adult. Meanwhile, all the normal students were lied to about how much of a special snow flake they were.
Re: (Score:2)
Hmm.... That sounds like 90% of a hit TV series premise to me. Just add "and solving ingenious crimes that baffle the police" to that story and I thing we have it.
Good for you for having the wit to not believe what you were told and the fortitude to get to college anyway.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
the 90's had eyeballs. tens of millions of them.
Welcome. To Zombo com. You can do anything at Zombo com. The only limitation is yourself.
Re:The 90's all over again... (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah ... seems to boil down to "nobody wanted our stuff", "had no idea how to make it into a business", and "my magical idea didn't work".
Solutions in search of an actual problem in many cases from the sounds of it.
And, once again, venture capitalists are parted with their money ... in around 1999 it seemed like the simple act of registering a .com domain could get you millions in funding and create some paper millionaires overnight. The Herman Miller chairs left in the wake was legendary.
I'd actually love to see stats on startups ... what minuscule fraction don't go under leaving a bunch of employees how they didn't see that coming?
Re:The 90's all over again... (Score:4, Insightful)
Solutions in search of an actual problem in many cases from the sounds of it.
On the other hand, I've heard that the apple model under Jobs was 'come out with something that the customers don't even know they want yet'. IE Apple didn't look at what customers said they wanted, they looked instead at what they thought customers 'needed' but didn't know it.
It's a dangerous game. You can win big, or lose everything doing that.
Re:The 90's all over again... (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, there was one big difference: Jobs and co. had a knack for correctly guessing what folks would want. More importantly, they knew how to take great ideas with shitty execution**, and turn them into solid devices that people clamored for. Consider that mp3 players were out long before the iPod, but the iPod was the first device that made the idea usable by Joe Everyman. The iPhone? Same thing. iPad? Yup. The iWatch thingy? Ditto...
** by shitty execution, I mean that the progenitor products were great items for geeks and technically-minded folk who had no problems with using it, but it outright sucked for the typical non-techie type.
Re: (Score:3)
Solutions in search of an actual problem in many cases from the sounds of it.
On the other hand, I've heard that the apple model under Jobs was 'come out with something that the customers don't even know they want yet'.
Steve Jobs made products that he thought he would like himself. Since he wasn't your classic geek but instead a perfectionistic and brutal minimalist, it worked. That's often how it works with devices. Clever stuff on the inside, austere simplicity on the outside.
Re: (Score:3)
IE Apple didn't look at what customers said they wanted, they looked instead at what they thought customers 'needed' but didn't know it.
That's called "marketing" and is something which startups and small companies in general do not do very well at all.
Re: (Score:2)
Marketing is when you have something and you want to make people want to buy it. Making something people want to pay money for is something different called "design". Apple has good marketing, but that's not the reason for its success.
Re: (Score:3)
Err no. Design is making something. Period. Doesn't matter if it's good or bad.
Market research is an aspect of marketing, and in many places marketing will drive design decisions. Also you may have forgotten how the entire world laughed at Apple when their first iPhone came out. Too big, too fragile, tiny keyboard wtf, too complicated, too expensive, and how are you supposed to type on something without some tactile feedback. Marketing is what turned those opinions into the game changer it ultimately became
Re: (Score:3)
> Solutions in search of an actual problem in many cases from the sounds of it.
This. I was looking at one of them here to pick on: CertTime. Great IDEA sure. Timestamp. Nice.
Then there is this little note on the page about it: ....still no interest to use the service.
"Talked to the designer friends - No criticisms at all. Exactly as it should be. - and still no interest to use the service - Let me have a look later. "
Why? Because its a solution to a problem that doesn't exist. Anyone with half a brain wh
Re: (Score:3)
Yes MORE valuable but..... more than what? People generally don't actually need timestamped documents, its a theoretical need to protect from a future issue that is likely to never happen. So most people, quite rightly, don't care.
I have never gotten anything notarized unless someone said to me "it has to be notarized". I imagine most people, again quite rightly, don't bother.
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah ... seems to boil down to "nobody wanted our stuff", "had no idea how to make it into a business", and "my magical idea didn't work".
There's some real good advice buried under all the "I'm a special snowflake but the market was too stupid to see how special I am!" idiocy. Like this one, for example: 99 reasons [medium.com]
(Yes, I RTFA *and* I clicked the links)
Re:The 90's all over again... (Score:5, Interesting)
This type of stuff happens all the time. A lot of people failed to realize that running a business is harder than it seems when you don't.
"If you build it, they will come" is a false statement. "If you build it, and people want it, if they don't you need to market it so they want it, if they do they need to know about it, if they know about it they need to like it better then any alternatives... To do this you need funding"
Re: (Score:2)
Heck, you need funding or a lot of free time (and money in the bank to pay your own personal bills) to just get something to the point you can show it to someone else to find out if it is worth continuing to make it good enough to seek funding to do the marketing, etc.
I had an idea based on a problem I saw here at work, and I know that a good solution would have kept me comfortable for a looong time. Unfortunately, I would need to take 6 months to a year to develop it well enough to even begin trying to se
Re: (Score:2)
Why can't you do it? Life commitments? I know when I was single with no kids I would be ok living out of a storage locker if I had to. But today, it's not only a matter of can or can't but also wanting it. Life perspectives have changed for me and it is impossible to be totally selfish and make other sacrifice a pretty good life. No regrets either way.
Hope you get a chance to develop your idea. Cheers.
Re: (Score:3)
When it is just your life, you can take chances, when you are responsible for others then you need to take it safe.
Re: (Score:3)
When it is just your life, you can take chances, when you are responsible for others then you need to take it safe.
No. You divorce your spouse, give them custody and make your maintenance payments on time. That's it. You are now free to take risks. When you fail, damage to your kids is limited to whatever your maintenance payment is. If you succeed, the reward to your kids is many times more what the maintenance payment is. Many many times more.
If your spouse is too poor to give your kids even a basic upbringing without your help then he/she had no business having kids in the first place.
Finally, if *you're* the one p
Re: (Score:2)
You divorce your spouse, give them custody and make your maintenance payments on time. That's it. You are now free to take risks.
If you really have that little interest in your spouse and kids, I don't see why you'd bother getting married and having them in the first place.
Re: (Score:2)
You divorce your spouse, give them custody and make your maintenance payments on time. That's it. You are now free to take risks.
If you really have that little interest in your spouse and kids, I don't see why you'd bother getting married and having them in the first place.
Having very little interest in kids != Having very little interest in procreation.
Thing is, if this works for you the payoff for your progeny is immense, and if it fails the damage to your progeny is almost insignificant. I /feel/ it's a no-brainer; that one parent should ensure survivability(sp?) of the offspring and the other parent should take the risks makes perfect sense.
It only falls apart if you buy the traditional/conservative/religious/whatever narrative: that you can only be a good parent if you
Re: (Score:2)
heh, interesting view. Did you do as you suggested here?
Yup!
Re: (Score:2)
Wow, and a I thought *I* was a selfish sociopath. Strategy amounts to throwing your own wife and kids under a bus so that you can gamble your future, and if they struggle, well, it was their fault anyways. Nope, you can keep your moonshot.
Who said anything about throwing them under a bus? If your spouse cannot at least raise kids on his/her own without your financial help then you having kids with them is most unwise, so with at least one proven stupid decision behind you then perhaps you shouldn't be taking any risks anyway.
OTOH, if you spouse is employed enough to at least raise the kids then why not take a risk? It's not like your failure will cause them to starve or similar.
TLDR; If your kids will starve without your income, forget the
Re: (Score:2)
Whether $SPOUSE can make it on his/her own is one question; whether this is a good thing for $SPOUSE and kids is another question entirely. Your willingness to second-guess somebody else's family life is not a question; it's certainly arrogant and unwelcome.
Re: (Score:2)
Your willingness to second-guess somebody else's family life is not a question; it's certainly arrogant and unwelcome.
a) That "somebody else" apparently doesn't find it as arrogant as you do. Do you always step into conversations and berate one of the parties when the other party isn't complaining? (Hint - some might call it arrogant)
b) I did not second-guess anyone; I pointed out (and unlike you I managed to even do it politely, I might add) that there's absolutely no need for both parents to "play it safe", and it's almost certainly better for the kids if one parent plays it safe and the other takes the risks. How the
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Jesus, I bet you're a riot at parties.
I am. And don't call me Jesus :-)
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, I remember working back at a Dot Com in the late 90s, specialized in digitizing local news stations' broadcasts and putting them on the web with additional content. The CEO says the company was -too- ahead of its time, but see if you can spot any holes in this business model:
*) The company paid for network links at the TV stations, and the TV stations provided free advertising for the company (both commercial space and mentions of the website during the newscast).
*) The company sent small servers to be
What happens when autopsy.io goes belly up (Score:5, Funny)
where will the founder explain how it died?
Re:What happens when autopsy.io goes belly up (Score:4, Insightful)
FuckedCompany will return
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
where will the founder explain how it died?
I'm curious to see how /. explains how it died.
Four letter words: "Beta". Or "Dice".
Re: (Score:2)
where will the founder explain how it died?
I'm curious to see how /. explains how it died.
Four letter words: "Beta". Or "Dice".
Are you new here (I see by your huge UID that you almost certainly are)? Slashdot was on the decline well before either of those. However they likely won't end up on this list as they are by most understandings of the term too seasoned to be called a "startup".
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Slashdot has had its ups and downs. Beta is possibly its lowest point. There's little now that approaches the ridiculousness of the Jon Katz days, though.
Re: (Score:2)
There's little now that approaches the ridiculousness of the Jon Katz days, though.
For newbies, he was a bit like regular contributor Bennett Haselton, but with a distinctively insane prose style.
Re: (Score:3)
where will the founder explain how it died?
I'm curious to see how /. explains how it died.
Four letter words: "Beta". Or "Dice".
Are you new here (I see by your huge UID that you almost certainly are)? Slashdot was on the decline well before either of those. However they likely won't end up on this list as they are by most understandings of the term too seasoned to be called a "startup".
Yeah, it's amusing that people still think of Slashdot as a startup even though it has been sold 3 to 4 times over as a division of one company or another.
Most owners of a successful startup want to either become rich, by growing the business or getting rich by selling it to someone else. In that sense, Slashdot was a successful startup as it was originally bought by Andover for $1.5 mill + $7 mill in stock. Once it was sold, that was it, the startup days were over.
Re: (Score:2)
Right you are, for all 16 years.
Re: (Score:3)
where will the founder explain how it died?
I'm curious to see how /. explains how it died.
Four letter words: "Beta". Or "Dice".
"Katz"
Re: (Score:3)
I just check, Katz is no longer a filter option on my profile, if he comes back I'll be forced to see Welcome to the Hellmouth: A 20 year Retrospective on the front page.
Re: (Score:2)
I seem to recall a 10 year anniversary post on that some number of years ago? Even that must have been, what 2009?
Fuck it, don't tell me, I don't want to think about it.
Re: (Score:2)
I just check, Katz is no longer a filter option on my profile, if he comes back I'll be forced to see Welcome to the Hellmouth: A 20 year Retrospective on the front page.
I literally shuddered with a frisson of angst when I read your post, as though a teenager in a trenchcoat had walked over my grave, machine pistol in hand, silhouetted against a lightning storm generated by youthful anomie.
Entrepreneurs are not business people (Score:5, Interesting)
.
Many entrepreneurs wait too long before calling in a business person to watch over the financial aspects and business goals of the company.
Re: (Score:3)
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
Re:Entrepreneurs are not business people (Score:5, Informative)
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".......
Re: (Score:2)
True, however there is the catch 22 aspect of running a business, you cannot afford business people unless you make money, and you cannot make money unless you have business people. Starting a company you will need to be the business person, and it really sucks because if you are not a business person, it really isn't that fun.
Re: (Score:3)
There are many companies that are killed by the opposite process: they bring in Responsible Management that's supposed to tell the techies how to do biz stuff right, and in turns out that the Responsible Management essentially looks at the start-up as a stock scam, they want a flashy IPO so they can turn it and burn it and cash out fast.
Venture Capital often seems li
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Many times, the reason boils down to the fact that the entrepreneur's mind works very differently than the mind of a business person.
. Many entrepreneurs wait too long before calling in a business person to watch over the financial aspects and business goals of the company.
Absolutely correct. The problem is that entrepreneurial types pretty much by definition think they are always right and can do everything themselves.
They also have no medium or long term interest in the products or ideas they come up with, each one is just a way of generating money to give them time to come up with the next Big Thing. They are essentially like children let loose in a sweet shop, having a couple of licks of one lolly before dropping it and moving onto the next bon bon.
Damn the torpedos full speed ahead (Score:5, Funny)
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.)
Re: (Score:3)
The thing I'm going to miss about this dotcom crash is the lack of eBayable computer equipment. The market was flooded with oodles of cheap gear for years after the dotcom bust because of this. Now it's all Azure/AWS instances, and Microsoft or Amazon own it all.
Re: (Score:2)
There might still be some good office furniture, though. Also maybe some flashy, repo'd cars.
Re: (Score:2)
There might still be some good office furniture, though. Also maybe some flashy, repo'd cars.
Yes, thankfully Herman Miller is still making the Aeron, probably they will keep making it as long as there are naive startups to buy them. That keeps parts available, very handy since I own one.
Hilariously, it wasn't even designed to be ergonomic, just futuristic. Only chair that doesn't murder me.
f*ckedcompany.com (Score:2)
f*ckedcompany.com did this already, many years ago.
The forums lived on for a long time, and were a constant source of entertainment, but the entire site finally died in 2007.
Re: (Score:2)
when Fuckedcompany died in 2007, Pud put a notice on the front page.
"Fuckedcompany is.... fucked"
Even in death that site was amusing.
Re: (Score:2)
And yet no $$$ and never coming back. :/
Mmm, clickbait (Score:4, Insightful)
You'll Totally Believe Why These Startups Failed
Was it because they were in the business of generating clickbait headlines?
Re:Mmm, clickbait (Score:5, Funny)
You'll Totally Believe Why These Startups Failed
Was it because they were in the business of generating clickbait headlines?
If that was the case, the headline would be more like :
"You won't believe the one simple trick these guys didn't know before starting a business"
"UNBELIEVABLE! This one website might SAVE your business!"
"4 in 5 business owners are doing just ONE thing wrong. Find out this SHOCKING secret!"
"Learn how THESE business didn't follow this ONE simple trick"
Re: (Score:2)
If that was the case, the headline would be more like
Don't give them ideas.
"You'll Totally Believe Why These Startups Failed"
Is pretty click-bait too though. I clicked on the article only to see if they got called on it. They did. And deservedly so... but i had to scroll down much too far. :(
Re: (Score:3)
That, and you see way too many ideas boiling down to "$EXISTING_SOCIAL_MEDIA for $OTHER_DOMAIN"
"Tinder for Jobs" is particularly horrifying...
Re: (Score:2)
Welcome to TaskRabbit!
Slashdot (Score:5, Funny)
Slashdot - news for nerds, "got bought by dice.com"
Re:Slashdot (Score:4, Interesting)
I used to work for a "dot-com" startup, and getting bought out was considered a plus: founders get big bucks and some other shmuck gets the worries of making the contraption actually fly (i.e. profitable).
I actually tried a few startups on my own, some even semi-promising, but with a new family, I realized I needed a day-job to pay the bills and couldn't wait around waiting for such to grow big enough to sustain us.
Some lessons:
1. K.I.S.S. - Don't get feature-happy up front. Make "hooks" for planned additions if you want, but don't get carried away.
2. Low overhead - Don't buy junk you don't really need
3. Be adaptable - You will learn about the niche(s) as you go and will need to change to adjust to the knowledge
4. Have a Plan B. You may fail.
5. Keep the service super-cheep or free to attract customers at first. Few will pay top dollar for a new service.
What did he do after he read a click bait title? (Score:4, Insightful)
Hmm, oversaturation maybe? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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"
Well, the main problem is that WhatsApp was "AIM for people who don't already use Skype"
Tinder was "Chatroulett for real life"
and i have no idea what Flash Sales is...
Additionally:
Facebook was "the school yearbook/campus phonebook but on the Internet"
Google was "yahoo but without all the stuff Yahoo thinks are value added services"
Instagram was "Twitter for pictures"
etc.
So quite frankly, hindsight is 20/20. There is a lot less clarity about what will turn out to be a success vs what will be a dud before you
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Because people want froyo in the summer and cakes in the winter, but nobody seems to combine these two businesses into one successful one? Seems like someone could do it with used fixtures for less than the price of starting up with business with new ones, and cupcake shops and froyo shops go under all the time.
Re: (Score:2)
Quincy, M.E., MBA (Score:2)
My favorite (Score:2)
Starthead: "We were naive idiots"
Re: (Score:3)
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.
Re:My favorite (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
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.
He can be taught! You see, you learned by making mistakes and determined where you are NOT likely to be successful. Remember, the young and foolish risk takers are in a different season of life, so if you are going to do the high risk startup gig, do it young. Once you get married, buy a house and have kids different things become important. Knowing where that next mortgage payment is coming from starts to overshadow the lure of taking risks, and being home with the family is more important than working
Re: (Score:2)
Correction: "99 reasons but a bit (code) ain't one"
did not scale fast enough (Score:3)
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. [wsj.com]
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.
Another reason apparently (Score:3)
AdKeeper (Score:3)
My first thought was that AdKeeper [wikipedia.org] should be on the list, but apparently that turkey is still flying [keep.com], albeit with what looks like a different business model.
Re: (Score:2)
My first thought was that AdKeeper [wikipedia.org] should be on the list, but apparently that turkey is still flying [keep.com], albeit with what looks like a different business model.
If The Onion hade made AdKeeper up, they'd have been criticised for being too obviously satirical.
Up close and personal (Score:4, Interesting)
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
Re: (Score:2)
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".
Let me guess....1 out of every 2 Kickstarter projects in existence?
He should've seen this coming... (Score:2)
Kiniku
Read your body's muscle electrical signals, and control things with it
"Got jerked around by co-founders who tried to do more than one startup at once"
Sounds like they didn't control things very well.
Like a really late edition of F-ckedCompany.com (Score:2)
Thist looks like a really late edition of F-ckedCompany.com.
This man knows 10 reasons why you'll love cheese (Score:2)
Seriously, what's up with that headline? What's next? Here are some possible candidates:
Weekend warriors are not Olympic material (Score:2)
It doesn't help either that Startups are being pushed as the way to do tech, or the new way to make money fast (develop something and get bought out by a large vendor). It's become a buzzword. You get a whole bunch of people stuck on the idea of "hey, I could do that" or "hey I should do that" when they have only 1 of 20 facets required for it to potentially succeed.
Re: (Score:3)
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
Re: (Score:2)
Well actually I think its more the case that its likely true that such a person likely has insight and data about the failure that can help find the cause, even if he doesn't have the personal insight to understand it himself.
Kind of like, if a guy tells you his car is dead because of a blown gasket, you can hear it whenever you try to turn the engine over it makes this loud repeated clicking sound.
Now, it sounds to me like his car didn't start because the battery is almost dead and he likely has a problem
Re: (Score:2)
You know it could be they flopped because it was hard to find people stupid enough to go for it, even on the internet.
WeWillNeverBlackmailYouTrustUs.com
Re: (Score:2)
Taxes.
That's why I live in Texas.... No income taxes + low corporate tax rates = lots of jobs. I came here to work and it seams to be a good choice a decade later.
Re: (Score:2)
I went there for work but left because of weather, and because leaving Austin meant hicks in sticks. Also PDs in texas are fucking insane.
Re: (Score:2)
I went there for work but left because of weather, and because leaving Austin meant hicks in sticks. Also PDs in texas are fucking insane.
I don't like the weather and didn't care for Austin when I lived there either, but it's not hicks in sticks really, it's something hard to describe unless you've been there However, Cars and houses come with A/C, so the heat isn't a problem if you stay indoors. Most younger folks love Austin and it's unique night life and although I didn't like the town and traffic, there is LOTS of interesting stuff to do there. You might try Dallas, or big cities are not your thing Tyler (although it's hard to find work
Re: (Score:2)
Cars and houses come with A/C, so the heat isn't a problem if you stay indoors.
That's OK if you're a basement-dwelling troglodyte, but if you like going outside, Texas sucks.
I have no idea what you mean PDs are insane in Texas.
Time for you to step outside the mainstream news. Texas is in the alt press basically every day, sometimes multiple times a day, for cops going batshit insane. There's a huge flap going on right now, if you don't know about it, that should be seriously embarrassing to you.
Re: (Score:3)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
idea: app to order and pay for drinks at a bar or nightclub reason for failure: "hard to market ourselves properly in bars without being there"
I rather admire the complete stupidity of that and hope they managed to get funding on kickstarter for it.