14 Startup Postmortems

Stories of failure and lessons learned

Product Hunt is a celebration of products but the reality is, most will fail. Lately there appears to be several public postmortems of founders sharing their failures.

I have tremendous respect for those that vulnerably share their mistakes and lessons learned. Although people, technologies, and markets change, we can learn from these stories.

Here is a collection of fantastic postmortems I’ve saved over the past several months:

• Everpix — Out of the picture: why the world’s best photo startup is going out of business
• Flud — Why Startups Fail: A Postmortem For Flud, The Social Newsreader
• Sonar — Postmortem of a Venture-backed Startup
• Plancast — The Uphill Battle Of Social Event Sharing: A Post-Mortem for Plancast
• Flowtab — The Decline And Fall Of Flowtab, A Startup Story
• Formspring — Formspring — A Postmortem
• Wesabe — Why Wesabe Lost to Mint
• Gowalla — Play by your own rules
• EventVue — EventVue post-mortem
• PlayCafe — 10 lessons from a failed startup
• Untitled Partners — Lessons from a startup failure
• Teamometer — Startup lessons learned from my failed startup
• Outbox — Outbox is Shutting Down—A Note of Gratitude
• Drawquest — Today my startup failed