Here's a book I wrote that covers 150 failed internet startups from the late 90's.<p><a href="http://amazon.com/FD-Companies-Spectacular-Dot-com-Flameouts-ebook/dp/B000FC0OCW/" rel="nofollow">http://amazon.com/FD-Companies-Spectacular-Dot-com-Flameouts...</a><p>I think many of them could be successful if relaunched today.
Most of these, given the order, look to be from our original compilation of startup failure post-mortems. We've compiled 101 to date which you can see here.<p><a href="https://www.cbinsights.com/blog/startup-failure-post-mortem/" rel="nofollow">https://www.cbinsights.com/blog/startup-failure-post-mortem/</a><p>Perhaps more useful, we also sifted through and analyzed each post-mortem to identify the top 20 reasons for startup failure. The biggest reasons founders have cited has not been running out of money or the economy but building a solution looking for a problem.
Maybe I'm in the minority here, but it's really not cool to copy people's writing wholesale into a book. It's really a terrible way to pay back people who were willing to publicly share their startup failures (in a format they controlled).<p>Also, the "I'm not profiting, looking to profit from these collected works" disclaimer is almost as bad as "no copyright infringement intended" on YouTube videos. Regardless of your profit, it is still copyright infringement to copy people's content without their consent.<p>It's especially egregious that the original source is only listed at the end of articles, where there's no reason to bother clicking through (since you've already read it). Plus, in many cases the original sources had relevant and interesting images which are omitted here.
Did you obtain the permission of the authors to republish their content like this?<p>And if so, did you leave out stories that may be of interest? Then I'd suggest you link those on a separate list.<p>And if you did not obtain permission then you probably should!
There are some interesting stories in here (check out the condom key-chain one), but it would be nice if they were broken down by industry, or at least didn't have quite so many service-offered-over-web/new-blogging-service stories. Maybe its just that there are so many of those these days? It makes me wonder if anyone reading this has some information breaking down startup failure rates by industry or sector... perhaps with average capitalization and length of operation before failure. It would make sense to me that the typical cat-video-sharing startup might have a much higher failure rate, but lower capital cost and years invested, than say, genomics startups or solar power startups. It might be good to see how gift stores, enterprise software or financial services fit in between those extremes.<p>Thanks for posting them here. This is great HN content.
Great idea. Would be useful to have a summary of the business model at the top of each article. For example #68 Overto I've got no idea what they did and I want to know before reading about why they failed.
I'd also add Everpix as well: <a href="http://www.theverge.com/2013/11/5/5039216/everpix-life-and-death-inside-the-worlds-best-photo-startup" rel="nofollow">http://www.theverge.com/2013/11/5/5039216/everpix-life-and-d...</a>
Twitpic is actually not dead
<a href="http://www.theverge.com/2014/9/18/6445597/twitpic-says-it-wont-be-shutting-down-after-all" rel="nofollow">http://www.theverge.com/2014/9/18/6445597/twitpic-says-it-wo...</a>
This is an amazing resource. I just read a couple of them, it is gut-wrenching to read the founders' stories, but a reminder to everyone else to learn and not repeat them.
a while back I asked for something like this except for current startups, successfull or not, and what they have learned. currently I'm following Mediums startup section