The tech media is filled with articles gushing over startups that have attracted millions of users, raised millions of dollars, been acquired, or are on their way to surefire success.
However, the reality is still that the majority of startups fail. These failures are usually not written about unless it’s a high profile flameout from a company that was well known. It’s too bad, because it seems like there’s a lot more to learn from why a startup failed than just hearing about the latest success story.
It’s also not that common for the founders of failed startups to be public and forthcoming about what went wrong.
The latest postmortem of a failed startup comes from Steve Poland and his startup MyFavorites.
Steve goes over the big vision for MyFavorites while also being very forthcoming by sharing spreadsheets, mockups, and other artifacts from his startup journey.
As an entrepreneur, it’s the kind of blog post you never want to write, but I’d like to thank Steve for sharing it with the world.
You along with someone else… make me think I should be writing a series of posts on TechCrunch. How would they be? Interviews with founders that … this is where I want to say “gave up” or “quit”. There are various circumstances for all the situations of failure — ran out of funds, etc. Wondering how you would see the format of a blog post postmortem about others? What should be included to find it beneficial? [I agree the failure lessons by others would be beneficial]
A blog post series would be great Steve. I agree that “failure” isn’t necessarily the most positive word and in many ways “giving up” or “quitting” can be more accurate in certain instances.
I’ll have to think about the format a little bit. I’m sure it could be broken down into various topics to cover where things went wrong like:
– Idea
– Hiring/Team
– Marketing
– Fundraising
– Customer Development
– Competition
– General Execution
But in many ways, just kind of reading your organic story of the big vision and then what went wrong at various stages was good.
I’m really digging @kevinrose’s FOUNDATION video interview series and the
way he conducts these interviews, i.e.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCkzTZvKpP4
Other founders could be interviewed this way about failure.
Agreed, that would be a great video format for it.