How My Startup Failed

I could swear this has been on here before... In any case an interesting story though perhaps not relevant so much to web startups

This would have been a perfect fit for "sell before you build". If he would have secured a large order from a retailer and then put it in production, he would have been successful. Not securing a large order would have told him it just wasn't worth doing. I don't think the "sell before you build" method it is a good fit for all businesses though.

<p><pre><code> There was no doubt about it: I had discovered The Next Big Thing. Like Edison and the lightbulb, like Gates and the pc operating system </code></pre> Ouch.

<i>"Though I had a Stanford MBA and regularly consulted on multimillion-dollar projects, I didn’t know the first thing about starting a business."</i><p>That's a little scary.

Its always nice to read about how startups succeed, but maybe more can be learned from these postmortems.<p>I was thinking you almost want a dedicated site for these... but could that be achieved by just having tags and filtering by tag on HN ?<p>Tags would help with a range of scenarios, such as if I'm only interested in Erlang posts by squid-farming bodybuilders, for example.

"I was about to become the first person in America to sell condom key chains."<p>Just in case you didn't rtfa yet, this is how it opens :)

He has an MBA

You know? This was one hell of an education, the kind of thing I wish I could read and learn more about.

I adore that customs clerk!

Well I guess that shows which is easier: Investment banking or doing a startup.<p>;-)