50 Reasons to Say Goodbye: Book 1 in the Fifty Reasons Series

The Happy Home Company shuts down, team members move to Google. The Happy Home Company. How SunEdison went from Wall Street star to bankruptcy. We are proud of what we accomplished along the way: As of Aug 29, Washio will be shutting down its operations. No more orders will be accepted and outstanding orders will be returned promptly to customers. Walgreens to Shut Down Drugstore. MaxPlay lays off almost all workers as game engine startup switches to licensing. It was a very expensive proposition, with high potential rewards … There was a high demand and high interest in what we were doing.

That is what was so disappointing.

I think you will see several companies license our technology … This has nothing to do with the competition. It has to do with the funding issue.

I think there is huge demand for new approaches with game engine technology. Millions still in the bank, GoZoomo shuts shop, returns VC money. We tried to build a fast-scaleable business, but realized that the business model does not work. So it is better that this capital gets deployed elsewhere instead of us hoarding it and hoping that something good happens.

Photo-storage service Picturelife shuts down 18 months after being acquired. Nobody is interested in cloud storage anymore. Google Photos and Amazon—they took a huge chunk of [the cloud photo storage market]. We built a product that was too generic for a very niche-based industry.

We had a much prettier product than the competition, but we were always lacking features in every niche. We were trying to do too many things at the same time. Both product-wise and marketing-wise. A transaction-based business model makes it hard to predict revenue, which made our growth curve look like a rollercoaster. The bottom line is that we simply do not have the financial ability to continue supporting the company … The reality is that a lot of events factored into our inability to raise: What we found was that the sales cycle for the market we specifically wanted to go after is just way too long for a small company to absorb.

Originally, we estimated that the sales cycle would be somewhere between three and six months. Many of them have worked unpaid for the last six weeks in an effort to get the business to a better place. Unfortunately, by the time the new management team took control last week, it was clear that the financial situation was pretty dire, and Karhoo was not able to find a backer.

We rounded up 14 more startups whose lessons ranged from fraud and investor dropouts, to logistics issues and product problems. A recurring element in this cohort was running out of runway and being unable to raise more financing. On-demand chef service Kitchensurfing shuts down. The startup had originally allowed customers to book chefs days in advance for at-home dinner parties, but last year moved to an on-demand model.

Neither version of the service, though, produced enough demand to be sustainable for a venture-backed business. The right words to say goodbye. The reasons are that 1 our revenues do not cover our costs, and 2 we are not able to close a third fundraiser …. In March , after having been rejected by VC funds, we signed a term sheet with a French, state-owned, logistics group, for a 30M euro investment. Unfortunately, after 3 months of intensive due diligence, their board rejected the deal and they ended up withdrawing their offer.

This needed to be researched more and understood better. We found that while tiers 2 and 3 of Indian cities are being served to some extent by new-world logistics providers doing cool things like one-day shipping, there was a whole slew of tier 3. Celeb-backed BlackJet Is Grounded.

There are some aggressive interesting models out there today, someone will make this work. For us, producing unique events presented big challenges. It was also really challenging to get solid, consistent margins. We stacked the deck against ourselves. We had an ever-changing landscape of staff, sourcing ingredients and everything else.

We were forced to self-finance the first couple of projects as a proof of concept, but did not have the resources or runway to continue. Eventually Yeloha shut down because we could not raise the financing we needed in order to massively grow our network. The stakeholders in education—students, teachers, administration, and the government budgets, policy, voters —operate very interdependently.

This means that if a teacher wants to use a tool or software he or she has to keep in mind the students, school policy, budget considerations, and even get approval from the administration. At SharpScholar we created a highly interdependent product—the usage of the product depended on approval from students and admin which effectively complicated our relationship with the teacher.

This resulted in us having different messaging for students, teachers, and admin as well as lack of focus as to who we are tailoring to. Minimize or eliminate layers of approval and interdependence of your product. Teachers prefer not to use tools that require different layers of approval from others. The problem was that [CEO Scott] Harrison says the big-name VC money came with tough liquidation preferences that would give those investors returns first if Backplane had a successful exit. For over two years, the company touted safe and reliable transportation for children via its family-focused ride-sharing service.

In , Shuddle received a cease and desist letter from California regulators for failing to register with TrustLine, a company that runs background check for adults working closely with children. Identity verification startup Jumio files for bankruptcy, will sell assets to early backer Eduardo Saverin. However, it [Jumio] competed with similar technologies like Card. The company appeared to have been facing troubles for some time — the company last year swapped CEOs after examining its books.

Founder and CEO Daniel Mattes was ousted after what may have been possible financial irregularities, Fortune had reported. Members of the previous management team have been placed on suspension during the investigation. After laying off most of its staff, clothing resale startup Fashion Project regroups. We were receiving thousands of items daily.

Palmer also says that it has proven difficult to compete with better-funded consignment startups when it comes to spending on marketing that brings in shoppers. An Open Letter to Twitter. On July 6, , PostGhost. Chef Nightly food delivery app shuts down amid intense competition. We rounded up 11 startups deserving of an autopsy from the tail-end of and the start of Its primary draw was luxury.

Each bus had a wood-trimmed interior outfitted with black leather seats, individual USB ports and Wi-Fi. The buses also offered a steady stream of high-end snacks, sold via app. I had come to the see the buses to find out what it looks like when a start-up bites the dust. The luxury vehicles were up for auction; Leap filed for bankruptcy in July. Which is partly the trap of the business model itself — because of the content licensing deals, the margins for the business were so incredibly thin.

You have to make it up with extreme volume, which is why you see Spotify going after every human being in the world. The result was a relative preponderance of lab researchers with Ph. Why We Sold to GM. In short, we were forced to shut down operations and sell. We were unable to compete against Uber, a company that raised more capital than any other in history and is infamous for its anti-competitive behavior.

The legacy of Sidecar is that we out-innovated Uber but still failed to win the market. We failed — for the most part — because Uber is willing to win at any cost and they have practically limitless capital to do it. Why did HealthSpot fail? The telemedicine industry weighs in.

Jason Gorevic, CEO of telemedicine company Teladoc, expressed his belief that there are three critical elements to success in this industry segment: This is where HealthSpot may have fallen down. Teladoc has two revenue streams: The Beginning of the End. On Friday, December 18, the U. However, we are still fighting as pilots to make this happen. Dehli-based logistics startup Delivree King shuts down.

The hotel industry is particularly challenging given the size, reach and budgets of the big players. At Top10 we did an amazing job innovating in this tough space, but ultimately the competitive landscape made it too expensive for us to scale, and for that reason we decided to close the company. Knowledge of what our software tracked unbeknownst to the average user clearly hit a nerve with a public already skeptical about how private information is regarded by large corporations and other organizations for their own purposes … And so, unsurprisingly, following the revelations, there was a windfall of announcements about which companies were using it and were not using it to collect information; lawsuits over privacy violations and legislation drafted to tighten controls for the future.

Some of those class-action suits, it appears, have been settled. Two months into its roughly patient initial Phase 3 trial, called Restore SR, researchers started to see side effects that would not have enabled Laguna to market the drug as widely as they had initially anticipated, [Laguna CEO Bob] Baltera said. Rather than trying to find any path forward, we decided to shut the company down.

While unicorns continue to be minted and mega rounds continue, there are still many new lessons to be learned from startups facing risks as they navigate the turbulent contract worker economy or failing to acquire customers. The 11 new additions, below. We never wanted to be the next Buzzfeed. We always wanted to be who we were, Pixable. And it was working. Unfortunately, circumstances [despite reaching 9. In the email, co-founders Karthik Balasubramanian and Brian Moyer stated their belief that the movement of investor interest away from consumer-facing applications for the technology was also a factor.

Balasubramanian and Moyer wrote: None of them were class actions yet, but they made fundraising that much harder. Selltag has shut down. Why Zen99 Shut Down.

Startup Failure Post-Mortems

We had a user acquisition problem, and the best route involved a competitor…The best acquisition method I saw was tapping into an existing network of people who had filed s: Unfortunately, Intuit released an identical competing product to us. Each member of our now pared-down team knew exactly how much runway the company had remaining, the status of our strategic talks, and the acknowledged long odds we faced as a going concern. To their credit, they remained focused, productive and on-task until our final day — a remarkable expression of dedication to the mission and to each other.

Sadly, and in spite of the achievements, we simply ran out of time and cash to finish the job. We tried to make some restaurants pay but it was just not working. Our model was no longer valid and were forced to cease operations in the city on September 7th. One of my formative Internet experiences was being part of the founding team of Microsoft Sidewalk later acquired by CitySearch in …[Sidewalk was] too far ahead of its time with some user experiences only coming into the mainstream now.

The Internet audience was too small, the bandwidth too low and the digital advertising too nascent. My hunch is Better faced similar issues. Shoppers were more tight-lipped about their purchases than originally hoped, and despite attracting 1 million users, the fear that pals might buy the same frocks outweighed the desire for discounts. The 34 new additions, below. So what went wrong? Farewell to Circa News. Our ongoing plan was to monetize Circa News through the building of a strategy we had spent a long time developing but unfortunately we were unable to close a significant investment prior to becoming resource constrained.

Slack ate the world and we failed to gain traction. The Last Guide Company. Unfortunately, having failed to execute on our original vision, we recently made the decision to wind down the company. It turns out we underestimated the complexity of the project, and overestimated our ability to complete it on a limited budget should, closer to launch, any complications arise. Down, But Not Out. Everything was going good. But we always had one issue.

We never had enough money in our bank. We ran out of money. At the same time, we are deeply disappointed that the market will likely take another several years to mature. As a venture backed start up, we did not have the resources to wait. While we were focusing on other things that needed solving, we took our eyes off you and your issues. However, our growth rate did not meet our expectations, and the service does not scale as we would have expected to.

Migrating from Balanced to Stripe. Wardrobe Wake-Up to Shut Down. Ultimately, we were unable to secure outside funding at a time of critical growth and did not have the resources to fulfill demand on our own. Unfortunately, not everyone who likes an app recommends it to friends and family. And besides that, they got stuck with the chicken-egg-problem. Melotic Exchange Shutting Down. After much deliberation, we at Melotic have decided to take the unfortunate step of winding down the digital asset exchange. Simply put, we did not experience enough growth in this product to justify the ongoing costs of development, maintenance, and support.

However, we have exciting new products in development, and we will be focusing our resources on that. As part of a settlement agreement with the major record companies, we have agreed to cease operations immediately, wipe clean all the data on our servers and hand over ownership of this website, our mobile apps and intellectual property, including our patents and copyrights.

A Statement about GigaOm. Hanging Up the Crown. Some of these shifts were in our control and some were not. In order to honor our core values, which have been the epicenter of our culture, we have decided to hang up our crown. We were living the American Dream. Until a patent troll — a company whose only business is suing legitimate businesses to force expensive settlements — hit us with a frivolous lawsuit. Talentpad Is Shutting Down. We failed to figure out a scalable business for a big enough market.

One of the things that our entire team has been passionate about is making a big impact to a wide ranging audience. We could not figure out a way to achieve that. This Is My Jam. The decision to cease operations and to shut down our service was difficult. Despite the best of intentions, we were unable to deliver a quality product that showed product-market fit. We had never used the existing home automation products in our homes. We were not experts in the IoT sector. When you have new at something, you give yourself the famous Dunning Kruger Pass on your decisions.

Eventually I had to realise that our basic concept was flawed. Premature Scaling Killed Us. The Life and Death of a Political Startup. And Kinly is dead because of it. With Kolos, we did a lot of things right, but it was useless because we ignored the single most important aspect every startup should focus on first: Case Study of a Failed Startup. It was hard to build it correctly from the start.

You charge how much the service is worth. Story of an Almost Successful French Startup. My startup failed, and this is what it feels like…. And the rest of the conversation explained why they would not be doing that. I knew they were our best shot of getting the money, and some of the angels who had previously invested were interested in coming in but only if I could get a VC to lead it, probably for some oversight. We now had very little cash left, and very little time to find someone else.

Seven lessons I learned from the failure of my first startup, Dinnr. And whatever we did later to try to breathe life into it iterating on the website, different marketing tactics was akin to giving aspirin to a deathbed patient. Technology would be so much better and more important all mobile today. Thoughts on shutting down Treehouse Logic. Startups fail when they are not solving a market problem. We were not solving a large enough problem that we could universally serve with a scalable solution. The End of a Great Experience. Unfortunately we were not able to adapt fast enough to changing market and product conditions which quickly began to show in usage metrics.

With a feed product on the horizon all looked well until our funding began to dry up. Deals fell through leaving me in the difficult position to close Backchat and YouTell. Why Patient Communicator Failed. This is a longer discussion but I realized, essentially, that we had no customers because no one was really interested in the model we were pitching. Doctors want more patients, not an efficient office. Twitpic is shutting down.

Unfortunately we do not have the resources to fend off a large company like Twitter to maintain our mark which we believe whole heartedly is rightfully ours. Therefore, we have decided to shut down Twitpic. Thank you fellow travellers, in your thousands. Behind the mountains, there are more mountains. We set very high goals for us when we raised our first investment in April As a startup, data is your best friend. Reviewing those goals at the end of the year, we realised that we have trailed behind on few of them.

For us a team, we have always believed in chasing bigger dreams and not take up smaller challenges. Failure of a success. If you still remember my pitch: However, it will not be with my GreenGar chapter. If only running a business were straightforward enough to boil down to one thing I would change to effect a different outcome! Here are a few at the top of my list:. Why our startup failed. One should not ignore the business process and issues of a company because it is not their job.

It can eventually deprive them from any future in that company. Some news about Wantful. The coming holiday season was shaping up to be pivotal for us, but the loss last week of a planned follow-on investment from a strategic partner leaves us little time to secure an alternate source of capital, or to pursue the other opportunities on the table. The Disruptive Advantage 3. Launching this globally would have required lots of funding in order to get production and logistics to work well internationally.

Getting deals with big international companies was hard and plugging into their production pipeline turned out to be technically impossible, since they did not have any APIs. Potential investors were not too crazy about investing in a declining market either. The numbers did not fully work out.

We moved when the operating-system environment was still being fleshed out — [Ubuntu Linux maker] Canonical is all right, but where is Red Hat? We were too early. We spent more than a quarter of our cash on lawyers, royalties and services related to supporting music. It took years to get label deals in place and it also took months of engineering time to properly support them time which could have been spent on product.

Although we achieved a lot with Tutorspree, we failed to create a scalable business…. SEO was baked into our model from the start, and it became increasingly important to the business as we grew and evolved. SEO was free so we focused on it and got good at it. The cloud is great. The bottom line is that no one cares about your data more than you do — there is no replacement for a robust due diligence process and robust thought about avoiding reliance on any one vendor. PostRocket to Shut Down.

When we first started PostRocket, we wanted to not only help marketers like you succeed in Facebook marketing, but do so with an exceptional product and service to back it. We were never able to reach the high bar we set for ourselves. Our product had many issues and even through the down-time and bugs, you stuck with us. We thank you for that. You have to pay attention to your customers and adapt to their needs. In addition to a lag in sales, new product challenges arose and pretty soon I began to question myself.

With each pitch following that period of doubt—whether it was to a girl at a party or an interested investor—my enthusiasm and perceived confidence dwindled. A Story of GameLayers. Looking back I believe we needed to clear the decks, swallow our pride, and make something that was easier to have fun with, within the first few moments of interaction. Serendip Is Shutting Down. The high costs of processing millions of posts every day, and serving relevant and engaging playlists to our users across our web service and mobile app yes, no Android, I know… are really bigger than we can handle, a very challenging position for a small startup to be in.

Unifyo — Post Mortem. We aimed to build a great, highly automated user experience first, focusing on the end-users and SMEs with plans to grow into companies from the bottom up like Skype, Yammer, Dropbox. We exposed ourselves to a huge single point of failure called Facebook. In retrospect, there is no difference between Verizon Wireless and Facebook in this context. To succeed in that kind of environment requires any number of resources. Today my startup failed. It may seem surprising that a seemingly successful product could fail, but it happens all the time.

Building any business is hard, but building a business with a single app offering and half of your runway is especially hard. I started to feel burned out. I was burning the candle at both ends. Do not launch a startup if you do not have enough funding for multiple iterations. The chances of getting it right the first time are about the equivalent of winning the lotto. Manilla Is Shutting Down. This was a hard decision given that, over the past three years, Manilla has won many awards and has been well supported by its valued user base but was unable to achieve the scale necessary to make the economics of the business viable.

A startup postmortem with a happy ending? Our biggest self-realization was that we were not users of our own product. We loved the idea of it. My presentation was ok. As I left the room I was shattered. Not a good sign. Unfortunately, we were not able to secure additional funding or scale to become a self-sustaining business. The high costs of processing millions of new songs every month while attempting to keep that data relevant and useable is monumental. Samba has had to take the difficult decision to close, primarily due to high and increasing — and therefore unsustainable — data costs.

This makes the current model of offering a meaningful value exchange of mobile broadband unsustainable. It is a shame that the progress of important innovation has been stalled because of generalized public concerns about data misuse. We stepped up to the occasion and supported our partners with passion, but we have realized that this concept is still new, and building public acceptance for the solution will require more time and resources than anyone could have anticipated.

I learned that a cheap is good, but too cheap is bad. It does little good to avoid burning too fast only to starve yourself of what you need. I re-learned the importance of a team, one that balances the weaknesses of some with the strengths of another. As fun as learning new things might be, trying to do too much yourself costs the startup too much time in silly errors born of inexperience. I learned the necessity of good advisors, especially angels and lawyers. A startup needs people who can provide expertise, credibility, and connections. You need advocates to help you. FindIt is shutting down — Thank you for all the support!

Starting a company and trying to change the world is no easy task. In the process we learned that the majority of our users did not need FindIt often enough to justify our continued time and effort on this problem. I was blowing cash — at a ridiculous pace. I had 7 guys working on this thing at once, as we were hustling for SXSW launch deadline. Inq Mobile Shuts Down.

The main asset the government and big companies has is time—which is the resource of which startups have the least. You may think government organizations are completely, insanely backwards; you are wrong—they are worse. Argyle Social is shutting down our service. What I learned about online-to-offline. Close, but no cigar. One offer stood out in particular, as it would have allowed Bloom to continue in the spirit we originally intended.

We have worked furiously on finalising it but unfortunately, due to very tight timelines and complexities associated with the administration process, the deal fell through at the last minute. We had turned on revenue, but did not scale fast enough. We were not yet profitable. Zumbox to Shutter its Operations. All of us at Zumbox remain committed to the concept of digital postal mail and have great confidence this capability will one day be the way you receive and manage your postal mail.

However, at this point, the time and cost required to deliver on the vision is more than the market is prepared to invest. Post-mortem of my first startup. Customers pay for information, not raw data. Customers are willing to pay a lot more for information and most are not interested in data. Your service should make your customers look intelligent in front of their stakeholders. Follow up with inactive users. This is especially true when your service does not give intermediate values to your users.

Our system should have been smarter about checking up on our users at various stages. Mochi Media Winding Down Services. Unfortunately, all good things must come to an end and this one did, too.

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It is better to fail fast, than to have a slow death. Our goal was now to transform that passion into a sustainable platform. We have failed to make this possible and without the resources needed for development. It has been a difficult decision to close the platform, made with every consideration of alternative ways to continue.

Many challenges in the world of ebooks remain unsolved, and we failed to create a sustainable platform for reading. We also considered the book subscription model but did not find it to be a viable option for us. Finally, even if all users paid for the app, it would not provide the necessary resources to sustain and develop it. A Post-Mortem for Plancast.

Unlike other, more frequent content types such as status updates and photos which can be shared numerous times per day , plans are suitable for only occasional sharing. Focus and simplicity are often more difficult to achieve than building features on top of features on top of features. As a result, too many startups are unfocused. The time required to trim back an idea is not insignificant — said best by Mark Twain: Oh, silly you, you have no idea how hard it is to get 1. Here is my advice: Then get your first Then get more and more.

Until you have your first 10 clients, you have proved nothing, only that you can multiply numbers. A Postmortem Analysis of Standout Jobs. That was a mistake. While I know there might be a possibility I could hustle incredibly hard and try to set up partnerships, the time investment required far outweighed the already incredibly slim chances of generating revenue.

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We were tightening up our sales process, but it was hard to market ourselves properly in those bars without being there. It quickly become a distraction to our operations in San Francisco. Formspring — A Postmortem. For the love of god, put them on. That meant continuing to operate while earning an income at night, which was fine for the months leading up to launch, but totally unsustainable once orders started coming in.

Lessons from my failed startup. My father told me that, especially as a woman, to never be afraid to ask for what I want or to remind others of their commitments. If you want to possibly build a product while your revenue is coming from other sources, you have to get those sources stable before you can focus on the product. Looking back at 7 years with my startup GroupSpaces.

Driven by the desire to hit significant numbers to prove the road for future fundraising and encouraged by our great initial traction in the student market, we embarked on significant work developing paid marketing channels and distribution channels that we could use to demonstrate scalable customer acquisition. No one that used the service thought it was that cool. They could easily have just gotten his music for free elsewhere. Out of the Picture: The founders acknowledge they made mistakes along the way.

They spent too much time on the product and not enough time on growth and distribution. The first pitch deck they put together for investors was mediocre. They began marketing too late. They failed to effectively position themselves against giants like Apple and Google, who offer fairly robust — and mostly free — Everpix alternatives.

Rimer put it a bit differently: Part Two of the HelloParking postmortem: But we never defined clear hypotheses, developed experiments, and we rarely had meaningful conversations with our target end-users. And while we had some wonderful advisors in the parking industry, we should have met with everyone we could get our hands on.

Worst, we rarely got out of the building. Play By Your Own Rules. Unfortunately, once your key metric is tied to cash value in the eyes of investors, it sucks to be number two. Your ceiling has been bolted in place. Your future capacity to raise cash or sell has a lid on it now. We felt that in order to survive we had to get our numbers up. We tried just about everything to juice growth, some ideas being more successful than others. Postmortem of a Venture-Backed Startup. We received conflicting advice from lots of smart people about which is more important. We focused on engagement, which we improved by orders of magnitude.

Growth is the only thing that matters if you are building a social network. Postmortem of a Venture-Backed, Acquired Startup. Decide how you want do things then hire people that want to do things that way. Does your idea only monetise at scale? If you want to build in the UK, find some way of charging money from day one. You can still use a freemium structure to up-sell later. Shnergle was never going to monetise before it had scaled fairly significantly.

Tis the Season for a Tigerbow Post Mortem. We raised a comparatively small amount of money from friends and family. For the most part they were very supportive, but there were exceptions. Aside from the fact that we got little non-monetary value added from these investors, people who are unfamiliar with investing in startups and the risks and challenges of building a company will drive you bananas.

If your monetisation strategy is advertising, you need to be marketing to an enormous audience. Vitoto Offically Shutting Down. Product outside area of specialization: Nobody in the team had built a successful consumer product before. We all had experience in the enterprise space, selling to businesses. We had no experience in consumer of video. We were not playing to our strengths. The team pulled the trigger on its initial launches without a significant beta period and without spending a lot of time running QA, scenario testing, task-based testing and the like.

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