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Countless startups around the world are being launched every week.
Many fail because they did not learn from the success of other companies who've managed to rise above.
We just published this list of 36 startups that failed due to a lack of focus, along with analyses on why they shut down and interviews with their founders.
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Information about the industries, countries, and cities they generally invest in.
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Information about their valuation, HQ's location, founded year, name of founders, funding amount and number of employees.
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List of startup investors in the FinTech industry, along with their Twitter, LinkedIn, and email addresses.
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List of startup investors in the BioTech, Health, and Medicine industries, along with their Twitter, LinkedIn, and email addresses.
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List of 250 startup investors in the AI and Machine Learning industries, along with their Twitter, LinkedIn, and email addresses.
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Brisk was a sales and marketing platform founded in 2012. They started to offer customization to paying customers, but this became costly in the long term.
Details of the startup:
Founders:
Alfred Beckman, Andreas Pålsson, Hampus Jakobsson, Mikael Tellhed
Country:
Sweden
Industry:
Marketing
Started in:
2012
Closed in:
2016
Nº of employees:
10-50
Funding Amount:
< $1M
Specific cause of failure:
Lack of Focus
You can read more about their failure here.
Design Inc. linked clients to talented designers. They reached market saturation and the startup could not make enough revenue to cover operation costs.
Details of the startup:
Founders:
Bjoern Zinssmeister, Marc Hemeon
Country:
United States
Industry:
Design
Started in:
2016
Closed in:
2017
Nº of employees:
1-10
Funding Amount:
$1M-$10M
Specific cause of failure:
Bad Business Model
You can read more about their failure here.
Kiko was a calendar app offering API integrations with other tools. The team worked on various ideas and plans at the same time, which led to its failure.
Details of the startup:
Founders:
Emmett Shear, Justin Kan
Country:
United States
Industry:
Productivity
Started in:
2003
Closed in:
2008
Nº of employees:
10-50
Funding Amount:
< $1M
Specific cause of failure:
Bad Management
You can read more about their failure here.
Lumos provided the ultimate smart switching tech. After the shutdown, the founders recognized they were not the right team to build a hardware company.
Details of the startup:
Founders:
Pritesh Sankhe, Tarkeshwar Singh, Yash Kotak
Country:
India
Industry:
Software & Hardware
Started in:
2014
Closed in:
2015
Nº of employees:
1-10
Funding Amount:
No Data
Specific cause of failure:
Lack of Experience
You can read more about their failure here.
MatterFab had the goal of making metal-based manufacturing affordable. However, the business never found a profitable business model and pricing strategy.
Details of the startup:
Founders:
Matthew Burris
Country:
United States
Industry:
Software & Hardware
Started in:
2013
Closed in:
2019
Nº of employees:
1-10
Funding Amount:
$10M-$50M
Specific cause of failure:
Bad Business Model
You can read more about their failure here.
Rdio, a music streaming platform, failed due to poor marketing and distribution, ultimately folding to competition from Spotify and closing down.
Details of the startup:
Founders:
Carter Adamson, Janus Friis, Niklas Zennström
Country:
United States
Industry:
Music
Started in:
2008
Closed in:
2015
Nº of employees:
50-100
Funding Amount:
> $50M
Specific cause of failure:
Competition
You can read more about their failure here.
Reach.ly was an analytics tool for e-commerce sites providing customer behavior patterns. Lack of proper market feedback made the company shut down.
Details of the startup:
Founders:
Ernests Štāls
Country:
Latvia
Industry:
Analytics
Started in:
2011
Closed in:
2015
Nº of employees:
1-10
Funding Amount:
< $1M
Specific cause of failure:
Multiple Reasons
You can read more about their failure here.
SchoolGennie provided solutions that saved time, reduced costs, and helped make better decisions on schools. But they didn’t test their product-market fit.
Details of the startup:
Founders:
Amit Gupta, Pardeep Goyal
Country:
India
Industry:
Education
Started in:
2013
Closed in:
2014
Nº of employees:
1-10
Funding Amount:
$0
Specific cause of failure:
Lack of Experience
You can read more about their failure here.
Shipbeat was an API to help e-commerces. When Shipbeat expanded its logistic services in other market areas, they had some big difficulties and shut down.
Details of the startup:
Founders:
Joachim Rørbøl, Kenneth Svenningse
Country:
Denmark
Industry:
e-Commerce
Started in:
2014
Closed in:
2016
Nº of employees:
10-50
Funding Amount:
$1M-$10M
Specific cause of failure:
Multiple Reasons
You can read more about their failure here.
Sip was made by ProductHunt. It covered news in the tech industry in a bite-size format. Due to no market need and lack of focus, PH shut it down.
Details of the startup:
Founders:
Ryan Hoover, Nick Abouzeid, Chad Whitaker
Country:
United States
Industry:
Productivity
Started in:
2018
Closed in:
2019
Nº of employees:
1-10
Funding Amount:
$0
Specific cause of failure:
Multiple Reasons
You can read more about their failure here.
Springpad was designed to empower users to clip, organize, and interpret all types of web content. The company failed to develop a monetization strategy.
Details of the startup:
Founders:
Jason Horman
Country:
United States
Industry:
Productivity
Started in:
2008
Closed in:
2014
Nº of employees:
10-50
Funding Amount:
$1M-$10M
Specific cause of failure:
Lack of Focus
You can read more about their failure here.
Stayzilla, once a thriving homestay network with $33.5M in funding, closed due to unsustainable operational costs and consistent financial losses.
Details of the startup:
Founders:
Rupal Yogendra, Sachit Singhi, Sachit Singhi, Yogendra Vasupal
Country:
India
Industry:
Travel
Started in:
2005
Closed in:
2017
Nº of employees:
250-500
Funding Amount:
$10M-$50M
Specific cause of failure:
Lack of Focus
You can read more about their failure here.
Stratolaunch aimed to launch orbital rockets from the stratosphere. Paul Allen’s passing away in October of 2018 spell out the same fate for Stratolaunch.
Details of the startup:
Founders:
Paul Allen
Country:
United States
Industry:
Transportation
Started in:
2010
Closed in:
2019
Nº of employees:
500-1,000
Funding Amount:
$0
Specific cause of failure:
Lack of Focus
You can read more about their failure here.
Tilt was a social payments startup. The CEO was believed to become the next Zuckerberg. However, lack of focus led to shutting down their operations.
Details of the startup:
Founders:
James Beshara, Karolyn Baxter, Khaled Hussein
Country:
United States
Industry:
Finances
Started in:
2012
Closed in:
2017
Nº of employees:
100-250
Funding Amount:
> $50M
Specific cause of failure:
Lack of Focus
You can read more about their failure here.
What happened to Vine? Why did Vine shut down? When? Does TikTok face the same risk? Here's our detailed analysis.
Details of the startup:
Founders:
Colin Kroll, Dom Hofmann, Rus Yusupov
Country:
United States
Industry:
Social Media
Started in:
2012
Closed in:
2017
Nº of employees:
50-100
Funding Amount:
No Data
Specific cause of failure:
Multiple Reasons
You can read more about their failure here.
Matthew founded Adproval, a marketplace to connect blogging and social media influencers with brands. Raised around $300k in funds and made $200/mo from their self-service software for bloggers. In the end, they made over $200k in revenue from consulting services but it wasn't enough.
Details of the startup:
Founder:
Matthew Anderson
Country:
United States
Industry:
Marketing
Started in:
2011
Closed in:
2017
Funding Amount:
$100K-$500K
Specific cause of failure:
Bad Business Model
You can read more about their failure here.
Brisk was a prescriptive intelligence company which suffered from lack of focus. Being dependant on Salesforce was a fatal mistake.
Details of the startup:
Founder:
Hampus Jakobsson
Country:
Sweden
Industry:
Software & Hardware
Started in:
2012
Closed in:
2016
Funding Amount:
$1M-$5M
Specific cause of failure:
Lack of Focus
You can read more about their failure here.
BusyMind was a simple app that guided people through basic breathing and observation exercises. Lack of time destroyed the startup.
Details of the startup:
Founder:
Kevin Lamping
Country:
United States
Industry:
Health
Started in:
2014
Closed in:
2014
Funding Amount:
$0
Specific cause of failure:
Lack of Focus
You can read more about their failure here.
Delite was a SaaS platform for B2B wholesale orders. It didn’t satisfy any necessity of customers. Just that thing in life you keep putting off.
Details of the startup:
Founder:
Patrick Walls
Country:
United States
Industry:
Software & Hardware
Started in:
2016
Closed in:
2017
Funding Amount:
$0
Specific cause of failure:
No Market Need
You can read more about their failure here.
Eloquis was all about bringing personalization to mobile apps. The problem? Early in the market and targeted the wrong customer segment.
Details of the startup:
Founder:
Rohit Nallapeta
Country:
United States
Industry:
Software & Hardware
Started in:
2010
Closed in:
2011
Funding Amount:
$0
Specific cause of failure:
No Market Need
You can read more about their failure here.
Duncan Hamra has been building businesses with his best friend Tyler since they were in high school. They built Formatically, an instant citation tool that didn't take off. We'll discuss what went wrong with this project, and how those learnings helped him start Memberstack.
Details of the startup:
Founder:
Duncan Hamra
Country:
United States
Industry:
Education
Started in:
2014
Closed in:
2018
Funding Amount:
$0
Specific cause of failure:
Bad Business Model
You can read more about their failure here.
Tarun co-founded Freshconnect, an online B2B marketplace for fresh agricultural produce like fruits & vegetables. After making mistakes like lack of focus and bad hiring, they couldn't secure a funding round and eventually got acqui-hired by another company.
Details of the startup:
Founder:
Tarun Gupta
Country:
India
Industry:
e-Commerce
Started in:
2018
Closed in:
2020
Funding Amount:
$0
Specific cause of failure:
Bad Management
You can read more about their failure here.
Justin Hunter had the courage to challenge Google Docs, all because he was scared of losing all his writing saved in the cloud. So he created Graphite Docs, a privacy-focused alternative to Google Docs powered by blockchain, that assured users that their saved files were indeed safe. And the effort paid off; he started gaining traction from individual users. However, he decided to focus on the B2B model, rather than B2C, and this decision cost him the business. Why? Read on to find it out.
Details of the startup:
Founder:
Justin Hunter
Country:
United States
Industry:
Software & Hardware
Started in:
2017
Closed in:
2020
Funding Amount:
$100K-$500K
Specific cause of failure:
Bad Business Model
You can read more about their failure here.
Andrew Askins, in partner with two of his best friends, started his company Krit in 2014. In 2015 they launched Ink, a tool that let freelancers create contracts and get them signed online. They got a couple thousand free users, but ultimately got burnt out before they could make the business model work. Now, they have been able to overcome this failure and build a successful consulting business.
Details of the startup:
Founder:
Andrew Askins
Country:
United States
Industry:
Software & Hardware
Started in:
2015
Closed in:
2015
Funding Amount:
$0
Specific cause of failure:
Lack of Focus
You can read more about their failure here.
InoVVorX was an app development company that both worked for clients and built their own projects. The business did it well for some time, having a team of 25 people, making $300k from their services, and raising $100k. However, their plans on working on their own products (too many of them) meant they started burning all the money and eventually had to shut down.
Details of the startup:
Founder:
Maxim Dsouza
Country:
India
Industry:
Software & Hardware
Started in:
2010
Closed in:
2016
Funding Amount:
$100K-$500K
Specific cause of failure:
Lack of Funds
You can read more about their failure here.
Legaats was a web app where baby boomers and senior citizens could share their important life lessons. 5 were the causes of its failure.
Details of the startup:
Founder:
Deepak Chhugani
Country:
United States
Industry:
Social Media
Started in:
2017
Closed in:
2017
Funding Amount:
$0
Specific cause of failure:
Bad Business Model
You can read more about their failure here.
Jordi Miró has been building products and companies since 2007. After a successful CTO experience in Wuaki TV, he founded Lernin Games, an EdTech startup focused on toddlers. He raised €1.5M and built a team of 10, but Lernin ran out of cash and the project couldn’t succeed.
Details of the startup:
Founder:
Jordi Miró
Country:
Spain
Industry:
Education
Started in:
2017
Closed in:
2019
Funding Amount:
$1M-$5M
Specific cause of failure:
Bad Business Model
You can read more about their failure here.
If you are interested in the no-code movement, you’ve probably heard Ben Tossell’s name. But today we’re not here to talk about Makerpad, one of the leading communities for no-coders, but about Ben’s previous project: NewCo. We want to know what went wrong, what were the lessons learned, and how it led to his success afterward.
Details of the startup:
Founder:
Ben Tossell
Country:
United Kingdom
Industry:
Education
Started in:
2018
Closed in:
2018
Funding Amount:
$0
Specific cause of failure:
Lack of Focus
You can read more about their failure here.
Marc co-founded *openmargin, a social e-reader app that turned books into small communities. Being too early in the market, having huge competitors like Amazon, and not shipping fast enough were three of the reasons for the startup’s failure.
Details of the startup:
Founder:
Marc Köhlbrugge
Country:
Netherlands
Industry:
Productivity
Started in:
2009
Closed in:
2014
Funding Amount:
$100K-$500K
Specific cause of failure:
Lack of Focus
You can read more about their failure here.
Natagon is an entrepreneur from Bali who, trying to solve a problem he was struggling with in his development agency, built a SaaS that mixed a project management software with an accounting one. Using cold-emails, he was soon able to make it profitable, but lack of passion led to its shut down.
Details of the startup:
Founder:
Natagon
Country:
Indonesia
Industry:
Software & Hardware
Started in:
2018
Closed in:
2019
Funding Amount:
$0
Specific cause of failure:
Lack of Focus
You can read more about their failure here.
Jack Ellis quit his full-time job to pursue Raw Gains, a fitness app focused on bodybuilding & coaching. It was self-funded and worked alone on the project. After a meaningless launch, he expected people would “just turn up” and stopped working on it.
Details of the startup:
Founder:
Jack Ellis
Country:
United Kingdom
Industry:
Health
Started in:
2013
Closed in:
2018
Funding Amount:
$0
Specific cause of failure:
Lack of Experience
You can read more about their failure here.
Sergio Mattei is an 18-year-old entrepreneur who built Taleship, a social writing application. He developed it himself when he was 16 and participated in a startup competition. Unfortunately, he didn’t win, but was able to get a lot of experience and knowledge that allowed him to grow it to +600 users. Hurricane Maria demotivated Sergio, who finally decided to shut down Taleship.
Details of the startup:
Founder:
Sergio Mattei Diaz
Country:
Puerto Rico
Industry:
Social Media
Started in:
2016
Closed in:
2016
Funding Amount:
$0
Specific cause of failure:
Lack of Focus
You can read more about their failure here.
The Blogging Manifesto was a blog to help readers with their blogging problems. The lack of passion resulted to be a big problem.
Details of the startup:
Founder:
Ryan Biddulph
Country:
United States
Industry:
Education
Started in:
2015
Closed in:
2016
Funding Amount:
$0
Specific cause of failure:
Lack of Focus
You can read more about their failure here.
Vladimir was the founder of Toki, a one-stop solution to finding trends and analytics on TikTok. It started as a side-project, but after launching on Product Hunt, they realized they didn't have a deep connection with the problem they were tackling and lost motivation to keep going.
Details of the startup:
Founder:
Vladimir Esaulov
Country:
Russia
Industry:
Marketing
Started in:
2020
Closed in:
2020
Funding Amount:
$0
Specific cause of failure:
Lack of Experience
You can read more about their failure here.
Gene founded VacationBird, a marketplace for finding your vacation rental. It was an early version of Airbnb and a VRBO competitor. Having a misalignment of incentives between co-founders and poor planning were the main causes to shut it down in 2012.
Details of the startup:
Founder:
Gene Maryushenko
Country:
United States
Industry:
Travel
Started in:
2011
Closed in:
2012
Funding Amount:
$0
Specific cause of failure:
Lack of Experience
You can read more about their failure here.
Fabian founded Young Entrepreneurs Program, a one-year educational program for entrepreneurs aged 17 to 23. After 2 years and 150,000€ spent, they had 30,000€ in ARR and had to shut down due to no product-market fit.
Details of the startup:
Founder:
Fabian Tausch
Country:
Germany
Industry:
Education
Started in:
2018
Closed in:
2020
Funding Amount:
$0
Specific cause of failure:
Bad Market Fit
You can read more about their failure here.
