The creators of no-longer-with-us products explain what went wrong

I always find post-mortems like these a bit strange. These founders are all able to develop some pretty convincing reasons why they failed (albeit in hindsight), yet show no signs of acting on it. I understand the feeling of burnout, I have a handful of abandoned projects myself. I've never been able to look back and say <i>that</i> is precisely why I didn't succeed though. Lessons learned is one thing, identifying the one factor that held you back is a bit of a stretch IMO.<p>Interesting side note: The first failed company, Verifiable, links to the sixth failed company, swivel, as an alternative. Apparently charting is a tough space.

The good thing about desktop software is if the vendor goes away, the software still works.<p>Not too keen (as a customer) on putting my time and effort into a SAAS hobby project that doesn't scale.

"Vitamin not a pain-killer" is a great metaphor.

The linked interview with Swivel was interesting. I'm attempting a data visualization startup. But I've found a niche where customers have a burning need and <i></i>money<i></i> but lack the IT resources to implement their own solution. It's not enough to draw charts; Excel can already do that. You have to provide everything customers need, from fetching the data to analyzing the data. And it's still a tough sale because SaaS is newish and people are uncomfortable handing off critical business data. I can think of a dozen other niches where paying customers need data analysis and visualization.

An even larger list of more in-depth post-mortems: <a href="http://foundersblock.com/featured/25-best-startup-failure-post-mortems/" rel="nofollow">http://foundersblock.com/featured/25-best-startup-failure-po...</a>

Did Storytlr even bother asking people to pay for the service? Seems kind of strange that with 10,000 users you can't at least cover $500 in hosting.<p>At $5 a month, that's only .1% signup required.