Everest was a goal setting app with the vision of helping anyone achieve their dreams. They created a great app design and built an inspiring team culture, but couldn't ship a product that delivered on the vision before running out of money.
Wattage had ambitious plans to let anyone manipulate matter. They had a beautiful pitch deck and video, but spent too much on prototypes for feasibility and not enough on real traction.
Dinnr was an ad-hoc, same-day food delivery service that decided to turn down a second round of investment it had secured via crowdfunding. They cite a long list of mistakes, including not solving a real problem, and learning that design doesn't solve business fundamentals.
Exec was one of the original online-to-offline startups which let anyone create / fulfill a task, pivoted to an online house-cleaning service, and then shut down. Their lessons learned involve unit economics, worker turnover, and difficulties with customer acquisition and customer activation.
DrawQuest was a mobile drawing community that was downloaded more than 1.4m times and used by 25,000 people a day but had difficulty monetizing on mobile.
Everpix was a photo storage service with 6,800 paid subscribers. Ultimately, they weren't able to achieve a growth rate that would secure them the next round of funding.
Decide.com created technology to predict the future price of consumer goods, which they sold to eBay. Their mistakes include hiring too much before product-market fit, too much debating and not enough doing, and learning that expanding sscope doesn't help with market-fit.
Flud was a consumer social news reader that didn't test its app enough, didn't test it with users enough to learn the core value proposition, and wasn't able to break through the noise within the news space. Flud pivoted to enterprise, and sold $500K in bookings, before finally shuttering.
Sonar was a mobile-local-social app that let you connect with relevant people nearby. They ultimately weren't able to find product-market fit, and detail an execution path littered with false positives, false negatives, and distractions with brands, side project, and more.
Flowtab let people use their mobile phones to quickly order drinks. They cite problems with inconsistent app usage, and distractions with patent filing, events/parties, and Shark Tank.
FormSpring was an early anonymous Q&A community app that hockey-sticked in growth for a while, and then stalled. They protected anonymity to a fault, and spent too much time responding to features of competitors instead of building their own product.
Plancast wanted to help people easily connect offline. Their biggest issues involved user behavior patterns, including problems with sharing frequency, consumption frequency, and user procrastination.
Wesabe was Mint before Mint. They attack a set of myths about their demise, and say that in the end it just came down to fundamentals: Mint did a better job of actually making users happy and helping them.
NewsTilt wanted to help journalists make a living from their work. They had difficulties building an audience for the content, technical issues, and team problems.
Untitled Partners enabled fractional ownership of fine art. They got smacked by the recession, had hiring challenges, and believe that being frugal wasn't necessarily a good idea.
