Mark does this with a wry humour which at times touches melancholy and desperation, while at other times touch fun and laughter. It is a lovely read, a bit like reading Gillibran Brown but without the menage and the discipline. The book has a funny way of starting out really snarky and humorous but bit by bit as love remains elusive the feel of the book becomes much more serious.
It doesn't end in a HEA but rather in a place of hope. The end sneak up on the reader quite suddenly and you are left to realise that the story isn't quite funny at all. I thought this was really excellent and it made the story real and nicely leads into the next book. But it has a lovely side too because not only does Mark ramble through various encounters but he also lives life to the full, travelling, working abroad and making home and friends in new places.
I enjoyed these vignettes of Mark's life and I know that at some point in the series he eventually settles down. I am going to enjoy working my way through the rest. If you are looking for romance with a happy ending, do not read this! The protagonist, Mark, spends 50 short chapters looking for love, and usually doesn't find it.
When he does, it is either one-sided or ends badly. Plus he is not always the most attractive character himself. You have to applaud one of his dates who walks out because Mark has been poking fun at somebody who had benign but unusual sexual habits - which had actually given Mark a lot of pleasure at the time. But if you Depressing.
But if you want to congratulate yourself on not having to live in the gay demi-monde, this is the book for you. Still, it rang very true to a certain kind of lifestyle. I am sure I will read the rest of the series. While Mark never becomes the most attractive character, there is increasing depth to the novels as they go on.
I would almost say skip this one and start with Sottopassaggio, you would not miss much. Mar 29, Roger Kean rated it really liked it. Sorry to see some GR friends whose opinion I rate highly didn't like this, a book which I come to rather late in the day… well, just a decade. I happen to enjoy first-person perspective, present tense, although I understand it can be pretty uncompromising.
And perhaps a series of anecdotal chapters rather than an actual story puts some readers off, but for me this worked very well. Alexander has a knack for finding the right way of describing situations and feelings without ever over-writing. In Sorry to see some GR friends whose opinion I rate highly didn't like this, a book which I come to rather late in the day… well, just a decade. In fact I have never come across a better description of the tawdriness of Hollywood, the physical repugnance of the place, and this skill finds many other echoes throughout this unique book, or its equally excellent first sequel, Sottopassagio.
Nov 14, Ian Sear rated it it was amazing. I wasn't expecting much from this so was pleasantly surprised by how much I liked this story. I could relate to a lot of this - that feeling that it's not worth trying anymore when every relationship goes wrong or when someone turns out to be someone completely different from what they first appeared to be. I really liked the writing style and the short chapters worked really well. The ending was like "noooooo" but I guess that's life. Nov 07, Elizabeth rated it liked it Shelves: I liked this book and I'm going to continue reading the series.
As lovers came and lovers passed I felt Mark's depression and disappointment. I was a bit disappointed that he didn't manage to find love by the end of this book. Of course, there's always the next book in the series I enjoyed it much more. I might read more of his books but not the gay ones. I prefer Patrick Gales books the are more relevant to me. May 21, Phil Mews rated it it was amazing. Went on to enjoy the other four books in this series.
See a Problem?
Quite possibly the most depressing book I have ever read. It gets one star for being fairly well written, and another for being a vaguely realistic portrayal of gay life in the early 21st century. I don't just want a book to be well written and realistic - I want the protagonist to learn something. To go on a journey. Sadly, the protagonist in this short book does neither. Stumbling from one romantic disaster to another, he spends twenty years labouring under the preposterous belief that only a Quite possibly the most depressing book I have ever read. Stumbling from one romantic disaster to another, he spends twenty years labouring under the preposterous belief that only a boyfriend will rescue him from his miserable existence.
I couldn't stand it. Not only does he fail to show any kind of character that might attract the type of person he wants, he starts every single date by weighing up the person's physical attributes. Everyone is immediately judged on their clothing, their hair, what they do for a living.
Now to some that might sound brilliant. If only it were true, ey? When some of the long string of boyfriends in this book dare to fall in "love" with the narrator it is far too much for him. Only he is allowed to fall in "love" with anybody, and when he does it is only expected that they will be absolutely fine with it, because he is different and special somehow.
Maybe that is the point of this book: I found myself feeling rather sick by the end. It's hard enough being gay in the real world without books like this telling everyone we're all clingy sex pests with no emotional boundaries. Knowing that there are people in the world who actually think like the narrator makes me quite angry.
I wanted to reach in to the story and give Mark a good shake.
Startup Failure Post-Mortems
Tell him to take a good long look in the mirror, reflect on the person who is really creating all the shit. I doubt I will go to the trouble of reading the rest of the series to find out whether he ends up learning the ultimate lesson: At the moment, I really don't care. It wasn't really what I thought when I read it, though.
Mark goes on 50 dates, most of which end in varying amounts of distasterousness. I so want Mark. I don't know if there's anything particularly ground breaking about this book. There's a lot of wit, the ending it expected at least I expected it and it makes me think I'm not going to bother ever try "Yay cheesy romance" might have been what I was thinking when I stumbled across this book and decided to buy it. There's a lot of wit, the ending it expected at least I expected it and it makes me think I'm not going to bother ever trying dating. Then, the very ending comes and I wasn't expecting that at all.
It kind of had the feel that Nick Alexander decided at the last moment that he wanted to make this into a series and needed some last-minute drama to bridge the gap. Maybe that's just me being cynical. It worked, I suppose; I did end up getting the next book. More because I really like Mark and the writing than the last-minute drama, but whatever. Not really anything else to say about this. I only gave it three stars because it wasn't the kind of book which kept me thinking about it forever.
It wasn't the kind of book to make me stop going to class to read. I don't do that. I probably won't read it again. However, I did like it, I thought it was well written and funny; I bought and read the next book in the series and will probably someday get around to reading the rest of the series, too. I got so frustrated with this book and its main character that I had to skip to the end to find out what happened - and even then couldn't care!
I think that Nick has a lovely way of writing and the overall idea of the book was a charming one. It's incredibly hard to find good gay fiction and that fact that Nick doesn't linger too long on the sex side of things prevents this from becoming a tiresome 50 shades knock-off. However, the main character was just horrible. Self-centred, whining, depress I got so frustrated with this book and its main character that I had to skip to the end to find out what happened - and even then couldn't care!
Self-centred, whining, depressive and not the kind of gay man that I would ever hold up as one who represents the kind of gay man I am, or that other gay men should aspire to be. I was hoping that at some point through the book there would be a maturing or at least understanding from the main character but he was so involved in his own life that this never came about. I applaud Nick for creating something original but I wish he had left Mark sat by himself in that pub moping over a drink and concentrated on the myriad of much more interesting people that were met along the way.
I would much rather have spent time with them! I loved the format, listening to the main character, Mark, tell me about his various encounters with various men. It has it's highs and lows, sadness and laughter, as I suppose all relationships go through. His life reflected mine, the life I had in the 90's. Though not as well travelled as Mark, I met an lot of people. I just did it but now all this time later when I look back and what I did and what Mark did, we have a few shared experiences.
The book is very well written, builds some really good characters and is a fine example of just how complex the human relationship can be. I can't wait to read the next instalment, which I have but I'm going to read a couple of other books before I go back to it. Mar 21, Alison rated it liked it Shelves: Another Kindle freebie and a book I wasn't sure what I'd make of but actually it was very enjoyable. The story revolves around Mark, a young gay guy who drifts from relationship to relationship trying to find love. Written as a series of short stories which sometimes entwine with each other, Mark travels from England to France to New York and back again, meeting men wherever he goes.
In some ways it's quite shocking how quickly sex follows a chance encounter, but the stories are actually sweetly Another Kindle freebie and a book I wasn't sure what I'd make of but actually it was very enjoyable. In some ways it's quite shocking how quickly sex follows a chance encounter, but the stories are actually sweetly told and I grew to love Mark as the book progressed.
Well I don't want to spoil the ending but I will certainly be downloading the next book in the series to find out how Mark fares. If you like chick lit and you're not likely to be shocked by the gay sex which isn't especially graphic Except for the egg, beware it's bizarre! Apr 23, Knittywittywoo rated it it was ok. I've read 3 other Nick Alexander books and enjoyed them so much i couldn't put them down but this was read so fast just so i could finish and move onto something different. I had read in reviews how graphic the story was so i was prepared for that but i didn't enjoy it and thats what has put me off reading the others in the series.
I didn't connect to Mark until almost at the end of the book and found him very annoying and needy. I would have l'll be honest here and i didn't really enjoy this book. I would have found it helpful to know more about his life and who he was rather than just the boyfriend search. It won't put me off reading more Nick Alexander books in future as i do like his style of writing, this time though the subject just wasn't for me. Jan 29, Tayanna Daliese rated it it was amazing Shelves: I usually hate stories where it jumps and there's not just a total linear timeline for me to follow.
However, I loved this. I loved how it was sexy without being explicit but don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with a good explicitly sexy story every once in a while, this just wasn't the place , and how it dealt with feelings and so many things that just needed to be dealt with. Homosexual relationships aren't that different from hetero. There are functioning Plastc Cards, which were demonstrated to our investors and our backers, and the capital was to be allocated for the mass production and shipping of Plastc Cards to pre-order customers.
At first, the principal investment group postponed their investment and a couple of weeks later the round fell apart. The tail end of and start of were a rough period for startups, in which many were culled from the herd. There are a million reasons startups fail, here are 26 more stories to add to the list. ChaCha, unable to find financial answers, shuts down operations.
Advertising revenue declined sharply [], leaving the company unable to service its debt, and no suitors took a bite. Dealstruck closed its doors after more than three years in business. It closed because a deal fell through. Doug Stephens, founder of consultancy Retail Prophet, said the company suffered from having too few managers from the fashion industry and too many from the technology sector. Despite all the appearances of growth, market awareness was still quite low. The Adventure Comes to an End. In the past year, the Lily family has had many ups and downs. We have been delighted by the steady advancements in the quality of our product and have received great feedback from our Beta program.
At the same time, we have been racing against a clock of ever-diminishing funds. Over the past few months, we have tried to secure financing in order to unlock our manufacturing line and ship our first units — but have been unable to do this. As a result, we are deeply saddened to say that we are planning to wind down the company and offer refunds to customers …. We are seeking a stay of this injunction, but if our efforts fail, we will need to take down the movies of all major studios.
Ultimately, we failed to overcome the chicken-and-egg issue between application developers and user adoption of those applications. We envisioned a pool of differentiated, fast-growing third-party applications would sustain the numbers needed to make the business work.
Home services startup Taskbob shuts shop. And to achieve those in a low margin business and in a tough external market proved unexpectedly daunting. More than what anyone could have expected. Among other complications, the monthly costs to maintain the servers, services, and customer support to keep the site running are not insignificant. Furthermore, the potential legal liabilities that may arise make a volunteer effort unappealing. Building materials marketplace Buildzar shuts down.
Buildzar started off as a pure-play B2C ecommerce business. In June, it pivoted to a subscription model. Earlier, we used to generate leads and convert them into transactions ourselves. But, after the pivot, we were just doing lead generation and selling those leads in the market … When transactions failed to pick up, we decided to wind up operations, which in my opinion was the right decision. A lot more wearable woe as Vinaya restructures and seeks pivot to b2b.
Whilst we ended up going by way of the system of founding and creating a buyer electronics corporation, it grew to become apparent that the projected amount of expansion for the B2C company by yourself was unlikely to be ready to maintain the expenses linked with the velocity of technological innovation necessary … to continue being aggressive in this space.
Shaikh cited three reasons for the decision. In short, due to a lack of funding, we are now beginning the process of winding down BriefMe and will be turning off the servers next week … Our users are extremely passionate, but after pursuing every possible path, we no longer have a sustainable avenue forward for the company. Without sufficient capital to provide BriefMe the energy and attention it deserves we have decided to move forward in the best possible manner for our team, supporters and users.
Open source wearable Angel shuts down. However, over the last year or so, the regulatory pressures has been increasing to the point that it is no longer feasible to maintain the operation of the platform. We are regretfully announcing that we will have to begin terminating the services effective immediately. Rendeevoo is no more. Bills were piling up on the business but also on our personal lives.
In the meantime, we started discussing a potential exit with interested parties. Again, nothing fruitful happened on that front. Y Combinator-backed Omniref is shutting down on January 31, Bitphone closing due to regulatory requirements. And believe me, they tried! All customer funds are secure and accounted for!
And we are happy to say that! Our underlying carrier service now requires we collect your identification when placing calls. All Romance eBooks is Shutting Down. For the first year since opening in , we will be posting a loss. Despite efforts to maintain and grow our market share, sales and profits have declined. There is a distinctly unsexy side to running a start-up that made every effort to push-through almost impossible. In it was announced that NBC was going to develop a quiz show based on the game, which was supposed to premiere in spring One could say that we placed too many eggs in the NBC basket.
We have spent a lot of time and energy on developing the show. Unfortunately sales fell short of what we needed to continue development. Alberta Health Services shuts down innovative meal-sharing system. Alberta Health Services issued a cease-and-desist order to Scarf, shutting down the meal sharing service last month. This includes working with food operators to ensure they are meeting the provincial standards required to serve safe and healthy food to Albertans. Scarf cooks did not have those permits.
Scarf operator Kian Parseyan [said]: We regret to inform you that Shelfie will be ceasing operations on January 31, … We started Shelfie with the idea of connecting books and readers and we have worked hard over the past four years to make that a reality.
- The Little Soul and His Friend.
- How to Use Tumblr For Business: Strategy to Grow Brand Awareness, Attract Customers, Engage With Followers, And Increase Sales.
- Fifty Reasons to Say Goodbye.
- It Must Have Been Love?
- Essential Mormon Cookbook: Green Jell-O, Funeral Potatoes, and Other Secret Combinations;
We are grateful for the support we have received from amazing readers like you, who have been a part of Shelfie. We could not see the next round of funding coming. We had to change the consumer mindset and without that pre-Series A funding of couple of million dollars it was not possible. It was also a business decision that this business might not work.
Taking Our Goggles Off. The past few years have been a wild ride. One notable entrant actually gave money back to their VCs so that it could possibly help fund other new companies. 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. 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.
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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.
287 Startup Failure Post-Mortems
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.
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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. 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.