Startup Graveyard – History Shouldn't Have to Repeat Itself

An interesting idea. The trouble here is that analysis like this tends to document the symptoms of failure as if they were the causes. The actual causes are more likely to be very complex, based on circumstances unique to the startup&#x2F;people running it, require deep insider knowledge of the company, and in some cases be things people aren&#x27;t willing to admit or recognize.<p>It&#x27;s the flipside of a similar problem in analyzing why companies are successful. [1]<p>The little disclaimer at the bottom really says it all.<p>The attempt is a noble one, marred by data and insight quality issues. I think it could be useful if the site can source insightful analysis from founders&#x2F;insiders and make it easy to search by market&#x2F;product category. Perhaps even adding a badge to information which came from a founder.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tomorrowtodayglobal.com&#x2F;2011&#x2F;12&#x2F;09&#x2F;good-to-great-to-gone-2&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tomorrowtodayglobal.com&#x2F;2011&#x2F;12&#x2F;09&#x2F;good-to-great-...</a>

Lots of startups fail for timing reasons. There seem to be alot of startups that maybe just started at the wrong time. One example is QBotix that provided robotics for the solar industry, probably not much of a market a few years ago, but in the coming few years that should explode.

Potentially a great idea. I have wanted to see data on the reasons startups failed.<p>One of the problems with this sort of thing is that it is not clear what the category of the failure should be. In a sense, the vast majority of failures is: no sales.<p>But is this because of &quot;product-market fit&quot; (they just didn&#x27;t want it), or &quot;customer acquisition costs&quot; (couldn&#x27;t get the word out), or &quot;lack of runway&quot; (can&#x27;t get the word out fast enough).<p>That&#x27;s why you almost need some hybrid of story telling and data so you can compare what Balaji Srinivasan calls &quot;the idea maze.&quot;<p>I wish I could compare the series of decisions in some manner, and not just read it as a story.

Anyone else reminded of Fucked Company? The website or the book :-)

Every year the idea of a startup post mortem site or study comes up and as always goes nowhere because they can&#x27;t actually draw a causal relationship and tell the story of why the company in question rolled up.<p>Besides the fact that there is no incentive, in fact there is negative incentive, for key players to contribute to the study of failure, it also requires insane amount of depth in the very specific field which the company was operating in.<p>It&#x27;s the same problem as failed replicated studies not getting documented, it&#x27;s easier and higher incentive to just try again than to study the issue.<p>Really just needs to be a non profit that would run the studies and maybe turn it into a consultancy or something.

Looks like we hugged it to death: &quot;Error 508. Resource Limit Is Reached&quot;

In case this helps, you might want to A&#x2F;B test your homepage with and without coffins, watch the bounce rate. I bounced, the feelings created by my amygdala were too strong and overruled my curiosity or any desire to learn!

I used to do something like this on Downside.com, but only for public companies where you could get the financials from the SEC. Then you have some hard data. Startup Graveyard seems to be listing companies that failed before they even launched. There needs to be some minimum qualification, such as &quot;actually had at least one paying customer&quot;.

It&#x27;d be nice if there were a summary of each company without clicking through.

It&#x27;s sad that all the content, source code and other intellectual property is just lost. Does anyone know of a resource that has or lets companies open source their code instead of locking it away forever? Like a farm sanctuary but for failed startups?

It would be interesting to include (but really hard to do) startups that &#x27;exited&#x27; through acquisition that failed to clear the liquidation preferences. This sort of exit could also signal a &#x27;mistake not worth repeating&#x27;.

Can someone build an AI out of this to predict success &#x2F; failure factors ?<p>For the record : I&#x27;m being sarcastic :&#x2F;

This website should in the list too.<p>Reasons of failure:<p>- Couldn&#x27;t scale its web servers

Seems like front page HN is too much for this website. Only getting 500s and error pages.

I think a very useful feature for this site is a &quot;I worked here and want to talk about it&quot; listing.<p>That way, one thing I could do is research my idea &#x2F; etc for similar startups that failed, call up the people, and ask what went wrong.<p>The goal here, it seems, is to help you not fail at something similar. The best information will come from those that worked there. So, why not index just enough information to find those people, and then help connect you to them?

Great idea. Site is hugged to death at the moment I think<p>A quick issue that arose in my head is what happens if people turn away from ideas because they see it in the graveyard? Some ideas may have seen the light of day too soon...timing for startups is important, as shown in this TED talk - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=bNpx7gpSqbY" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=bNpx7gpSqbY</a><p>With this resource at hand, people might mistaken bad timing for bad idea.

This is cool and it&#x27;s always smart to check past implementations like this. As long as you learn <i>why</i> the failed not that the idea is impossible. VR is a good example; I didn&#x27;t see any companies on that list but many gave up on VR because it was too early to be possible until a few years ago. Another good example is digital currency.<p>Also; you can learn from a comp like Clinkle which should def be added to the list

This will have been the millionth incarnation of this idea I&#x27;ve seen in 20 years, from books to videos to websites.<p>I&#x27;m guessing nobody&#x27;s actually paying attention to history, otherwise the first book&#x2F;video&#x2F;website would&#x27;ve been all that was needed.

I like this idea; however, this is very subjective. Laying out 6 solid reasons for _why_ a startup failed is a bold statement. In reality, there usually isn&#x27;t a concrete reason why, but I guess it&#x27;s a good exercise to at least think about it collectively.

By plain logic: if there isn&#x27;t a formula for success, there isn&#x27;t one for failure either.

Wayback: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20170511100358&#x2F;startupgraveyard.io" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20170511100358&#x2F;startupgraveyard....</a><p>Not much got archived though.

&gt; History Shouldn&#x27;t Have to Repeat Itself<p>I used to follow another startup shutdown site that got shut down, though. :-)<p>Cool idea, I love reading those. I have no clue if reading about failures can make you successful, though.

Seeing this prompted me to revisit <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;thecan.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;thecan.org&#x2F;</a>, &quot;a pet cemetery for dead games.&quot;

Kind of sad to see a product you liked on this list. RIP Grooveshark.

Reminds me of a website focused on failed Kickstarter projects: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;kickended.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;kickended.com</a>

Startups, by definition, fail. The reasons are endless. Attempting to sum those up in what looks to be too few words is helpful how?<p>Entertaining. But is it useful?

This looks like a waaaay prettier version of <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;autopsy.io" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;autopsy.io</a>

I know this is very tangential, but I hate the design decision to have the hamburger menu mixed in to the graveyard stuff at the top of the site. It reminds me of those hidden object puzzles. It very much prioritizes aesthetics over usability. With more thought, the aesthetics could be included without having to sacrifice usability.

Sometimes ideas don&#x27;t work but then they do. Or vice-versa, sadly.

Nearly every image on the site being a ~600x450px jpeg seems wasteful when almost all of these have easily accessible (or at least easy to recreate) SVGs.<p>Unless wordpress doesn&#x27;t support SVGs?

This wordpress website is slow as balls.

Wow, rdio.com redirects to pandora...

perhaps the domain startupgraveyard.ai would better reflect these times

How does one submit?

Startup Graveyard: A website for cataloging failed startups<p>Reason for failing: &quot;Error 508. Resource Limit Is Reached&quot;