This free sheet contains 100 accelerators and incubators you can apply to today, along with information about the industries and stages they generally invest in.
This free sheet contains all the information about the top 100 unicorns, including their valuation, HQ's location, founded year, name of founders, funding amount and number of employees.
This free sheet contains all the information about the top 100 unicorns, including their valuation, HQ's location, founded year, name of founders, funding amount and number of employees.
This free Notion document contains the best 100+ resources you need for building a successful startup, divided in 4 categories: Fundraising, People, Product, and Growth.
There are a lot of things to consider when building a new startup - where to get funding, how to validate your idea, and what features should the product have.
One of the challenges is finding a market that is willing to pay for your solution without even knowing what it is yet.
However, 90% of startups will fail and shut down.
In this article, you can find 17 failed Productivity startups as well as analyses on why they closed down.
Information about the industries, stages and countries 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.
Get the Sheet for $50Information about their valuation, HQ's location, founded year, name of founders, funding amount and number of employees.
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Circa had the mission of ‘fixing’ what was wrong with journalism. They suffered a financial breakdown and were copied by giants in the news sector.
Details of the startup:
Founders:
Arsenio Santos, Ben Huh, Matt Galligan
Country:
United States
Industry:
Entertainment
Started in:
2011
Closed in:
2015
Nº of employees:
10-50
Funding Amount:
$1M-$10M
Specific cause of failure:
Lack of Funds
You can read more about their failure here.
Delicious was a social bookmarking site founded in 2003. Similar tools started to dominate the sector. They were finally bought by Pinboard for a bargain.
Details of the startup:
Founders:
Joshua Schachter
Country:
United States
Industry:
Productivity
Started in:
2003
Closed in:
2017
Nº of employees:
50-100
Funding Amount:
No Data
Specific cause of failure:
Acquisition Flu
You can read more about their failure here.
Flud was a social news reader platform. They were unable to raise additional funding for their operations and eventually ran out of cash.
Details of the startup:
Founders:
Bobby Ghoshal, Matthew Ausonio
Country:
United States
Industry:
Productivity
Started in:
2010
Closed in:
2013
Nº of employees:
10-50
Funding Amount:
$1M-$10M
Specific cause of failure:
Multiple Reasons
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.
Mailbox made your inbox more manageable and efficient. They didn't find a way to monetize the app. After being acquired by Dropbox, Mailbox shut down.
Details of the startup:
Founders:
Gentry Underwood, Scott Cannon
Country:
United States
Industry:
Productivity
Started in:
2011
Closed in:
2015
Nº of employees:
500-1,000
Funding Amount:
$1M-$10M
Specific cause of failure:
Bad Business Model
You can read more about their failure here.
Netscape was one of the most significant internet applications in history. Despite its early success, they couldn't beat Microsoft's Internet Explorer.
Details of the startup:
Founders:
James Clark, Jon Mittelhauser, Marc Andreessen
Country:
United States
Industry:
Productivity
Started in:
1994
Closed in:
2008
Nº of employees:
5,000-10,000
Funding Amount:
No Data
Specific cause of failure:
Poor Product
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.
Sunrise was a calendar app for mobile and desktop. They had good reviews from users, but calendars are hard to monetize and they have a low entry barrier.
Details of the startup:
Founders:
Jeremy Le Van, Pierre Valade
Country:
France
Industry:
Productivity
Started in:
2012
Closed in:
2016
Nº of employees:
10-50
Funding Amount:
$1M-$10M
Specific cause of failure:
Bad Business Model
You can read more about their failure here.
Transpose was a comprehensive information management platform. Operated for two years before shutting down due to the inability to generate enough revenue.
Details of the startup:
Founders:
Hussein Ahmed, Matt Goyer, Samah Gad, Skyler Johnson-Wagner
Country:
United States
Industry:
Productivity
Started in:
2015
Closed in:
2015
Nº of employees:
10-50
Funding Amount:
$1M-$10M
Specific cause of failure:
Bad Business Model
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.
Holger Sindbaek is the founder of Habitual, a habit-tracking app that was initially created since Holger could not find an app that could suit his habit-tracking needs after reading Atomic Habits book. With other successful apps under his belt like a Solitaire card game played by 3M people per month, it seems like he has the knack of making startups fly. So what went wrong with Habitual? Discover it in this interview.
Details of the startup:
Founder:
Holger Sindbaek
Country:
Denmark
Industry:
Productivity
Started in:
2019
Closed in:
2021
Funding Amount:
$0
Specific cause of failure:
Bad Marketing
You can read more about their failure here.
After moving to SF, Andrew joined a startup accelerator that included a co-founder dating phase. There, he met some co-founders with whom he built MotionThink, a startup that built productivity tools for freelancers. Some months and +$100,000 after, the startup was shut down. Learn what went wrong!
Details of the startup:
Founder:
Andrew Chen
Country:
United States
Industry:
Productivity
Started in:
2011
Closed in:
2012
Funding Amount:
$100K-$500K
Specific cause of failure:
Bad Management
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.
Ömer launched patron.ai, a gamification platform for developer teams. After promoting it on Twitter and Product Hunt without getting much traction, he decided to shut down the project. That decision was mainly due to a lack of product-market fit and not talking enough to users that signed up.
Details of the startup:
Founder:
Ömer Taban
Country:
Turkey
Industry:
Productivity
Started in:
2018
Closed in:
2020
Funding Amount:
< $100K
Specific cause of failure:
Bad Market Fit
You can read more about their failure here.
With 2 partners, Stefan co-founded Swipes, a company that developed productivity tools. The startup went through all stages and experiences, even almost fundraising $1M. However, over the 6 years of running, they weren’t able to really find product-market fit and they eventually ran out of money.
Details of the startup:
Founder:
Stefan Vladimirov
Country:
Bulgaria
Industry:
Productivity
Started in:
2013
Closed in:
2019
Funding Amount:
< $100K
Specific cause of failure:
Bad Market Fit
You can read more about their failure here.
When reading the Lean Startup book, Sergio came up with an idea he wanted to validate: a SaaS to help teams to perform at a higher level. The validation was done successfully, but since then, mistakes related to technology, founding team and listening to customers, meant its shut down 2 years later.
Details of the startup:
Founder:
Sergio Schüler
Country:
Brazil
Industry:
Software & Hardware
Started in:
2012
Closed in:
2013
Funding Amount:
$0
Specific cause of failure:
No Market Need
You can read more about their failure here.
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