Today’s Booze: “90% of start-ups fail” – A List Of Start-ups That Failed Horrifyingly

We usually only hear about start-ups that are successful or have succeeded already. We hear about their overcoming of up’s and down’s and the advice they give to future generations of entrepreneurs. Meanwhile, there are hundreds if not thousands of start-ups that ultimately fail every year. We already compiled a list about the most successful start-ups that you should check out if you didn’t already; now, prepare yourself for a list of four start-ups that failed horrifyingly.

1. YikYak

YikYak was an app released in 2013 where the users could create anonymous discussion threads. It quickly grew in popularity among college and university students in the U.S. The app was promising and could have been very successful. However, something went wrong. With its growing popularity, they wanted to monetize it by taking away what made it actually successful: anonymity, by forcing profiles on users. On the other hand, there were many other problems regarding cyberbullying and the lack of managing toxicity which led to the app to be shut down.

2. Peeple

Once described as “Yelp for people”, Peeple had it wrong in many aspects. It was originally created as an app where you could rate and review actual human beings. We all know how that would end (if you don’t, check out the Black Mirror episode Nosedive). After initial backlash and much criticism, the creators changed its most concerning features, making Peeple be just another social network, and not a very successful one.

3. Juicero

The founder had promised a high-end luxury and modern juice machine that was much more than the traditional juicer. Operating through wi-fi, Juicero was using single-serving packages of already pre-juiced fruits and vegetables sold exclusively by the company. If you were ever in doubt if the package was coming or not from Juicero, the machine even had a QR code scanner that could tell you! All of this for only 699 US Dollars! Amazing deal, right? Exactly, no one thought so…

4. Doppler Labs

The failure of Doppler Labs is simple and sad. They were promising, innovative, and creative BUT they started a hardware business, what else is there to say? “Hardware is hard”, as Marc Andreessen said. Doppler Labs’ products (wireless earphones and microphones) were not meeting the high standards of the market, thus they were not able to make profitable revenues and the company winded down its operations, officially closing in December 2017.

“90% of start-ups fail.” It is indeed a horrifying statement. Scary and spooky. All entrepreneurs would rather be in the 10%. But that is not always the case, and there are people who failed their first idea, or maybe the second. There is a lot of luck behind every successful business, but there are also brilliant ideas, hard work, and ambition. Take the stories we talked about today as a lesson and think about what you would have done differently.

How would you approach these setbacks? Do you think they were meant to fail from the beginning? Let us know about other start-ups or businesses that didn’t do it right and failed. Cheers!

References:

Conditt, J. (2016). Peeple is boring. Retrieved from: https://www.engadget.com/2016-03-09-peeple-is-boring.html

Failory. (n.d.). What happened to YikYak. Retrieved from: https://www.failory.com/cemetery/yik-yak

Jace. (2019). 11 of the most spectacular startup fails in history. Retrieved from: https://f3fundit.com/11-of-top-startup-failures-in-history/

Stephan, D. (2018). 7 failed startups and the lessons learned. Retrieved from: https://about.crunchbase.com/blog/failed-startups-and-lessons-learned/