I’ve been obsessed with reading founder postmortems lately. The raw honesty in those stories is way more valuable than the “10x growth hacks” floating around the internet.
So I dug into 50 different startup failure stories and looked for patterns. Here’s what came up again and again:
- No real problem solved: Founders built things they thought were cool, not things people actually needed.
- No distribution strategy: “If you build it, they will come” doesn’t work. Amazing products died because nobody knew they existed.
- Co-founder drama: Misaligned goals, burnout, or trust issues killed startups faster than bad code ever could.
- Pricing mistakes: Either undercharging (unsustainable) or overcharging (no adoption). Pricing experiments came too late.
- Burning out: Many founders just ran out of energy (or money) before they found traction. Persistence mattered more than brilliance.
Takeaway for me as a bootstrapper:
It’s not just about what you build. It’s about why, for who, and whether you can actually reach them without running yourself into the ground.
Curious: If you’ve failed at a project before, which of these was the killer? Or did you run into something completely different?
I analyzed 50 founder postmortems — here are the top 5 reasons startups fail
byu/thalavaisankar7 inEntrepreneur
Posted by thalavaisankar7
4 Comments
But _how_ are you going to avoid these mistakes?
For me you have to be able to sell very early on. No sales is early death. Everything else is added afterwards. If we’re selling tons we can fix back end, if we’re selling lots we deal with fall outs.
Testing whether people want to buy a product before full launch is best way for me.
Okay, OP, that list really hits home especially the “no distribution strategy” one. I’ve had products I was proud of just sit there because no one knew they existed. One thing I learned is you gotta go where your future users hang out and actually be helpful there, not just pitch. Even if it’s slow, that kind of genuine engagement builds way more trust than ads.
I used to sink hours into manually finding the right conversations, which is why I built Commentta to surface relevant ones. Funny enough, this post popped up through it. What’s worked best for you when starting out?
Variation:
1A. No real solution: Not fully understanding market need and building the wrong thing entirely.