About the library

The companies

148 of them, and what each one was. The description is the company's own, taken from the page the account sits on, and left out where the page carried none.

• 401Krypto Legally things have been getting weird in the space as the normal financial world tries to figure out what the hell crypto is and what to do with it. This was creating some legal overhead I was seeing in the short term if I moved forward.
• 8tracks 8tracks has had a long run and its day in the sun. We’re sad to announce, however, that the company and its streaming service will wind down with the end of the decade, on December 31st, 2019…
• Adleaf Technologies Chetan founded Adleaf, a blend of programming bootcamps and software solutions. Multiple bad decisions and mismanagement of funds made it shut
• Anar Despite our success with sellers, we couldn't create equivalent value for buyers, leaving a crucial part of our mission unfulfilled.
• Approkers How I created a product which customers never understood and my company got failed?
• Astra Despite our best efforts, as co-founders, we found ourselves at different crossroads regarding the pace of growth.
• Autto.in Autto.in was an on-demand doorstep car service provider. They spent lots of money on customer acquisition, but retention was bad, so it shut
• Balsamiq This year at Business of Software Conference 2015 USA Peldi returns to talk about the most painful moments he experienced during Balsamiq’s growth. It will NOT be fun.
• Bansho What running and shutting down an ed-tech startup taught me about founding the next one.
• Baremetrics (Intros) Intros, a product we launched to great fanfare three months ago, is being shutdown, having never made a single penny and costing our team months of work.
• Basis Robotics Basis as a company is shutting down. Thomas and I gave it a good shot but - we have no funding, and after our release, not one person tried our software.
• Beautiful Savings Secure the right domain name for your business or website today. Custom tailored payment plans available to fit any budget.
• Bench Get comprehensive small business bookkeeping services and tax filing support with America's largest online bookkeeping solution. Trusted by over 35,000 small business owners."…
• Bevy
• Binpress 3x founder, B2B SaaS w/ Gymdesk
• Blip while we continue to believe in this space, bootstrapping the business with limited capital made it extremely difficult for us to participate in the market.
• Brett Martin's Blog Entrepreneurship is more about failure than success, both statistically and emotionally. Most start-ups fail. You can only succeed if you are prepared to fail along the way and the world’s …
• Build-Inn Funds started drying up, real estate dropped, competitors sprung up from every corner. With no new funds forthcoming, and margins reducing due to the competition, we decided to put the company up for sale.
• Changenuity We haven’t formally announced it until now: Changenuity has officially shut down since mid-2018, after two years in the running.
• Circa It’s with great disappointment that we let you know that Circa News has been put on indefinite hiatus*. Producing high-quality news can be…
• Cita Madre Unfortunately, I have come to the realization that the people in control of the process do not want it to be improved, so I have decided to stop working on Cita Madre.
• CodeParrot We spent the next year stuck in pivot hell, searching for what our company really wanted to be.
• colive values The economics of colive values weren't strong enough to justify going all-in. Without external funding (which I wasn't keen on pursuing), the bootstrap path wasn't viable.
• College Conductor My Software as a Service failed. After three years of running College Conductor, I'm shutting it down...
• ConnectedH In the course, we ran into certain market realities which couldn't be changed with the resources we had and our place in the ecosystem, which led to the decision.
• Content Goblin I’ve made the difficult decision to shut down my SaaS Content Goblin. It’s no longer financially viable for me to keep running the software. Content Goblin was my tool to generate image based…
• Cryptine Networks
• Cydoc I was the Founder and CEO of Cydoc, a health AI startup, for seven years (April 2018 to August 2025). We achieved what many consider to be validation milestones: paying customers, patents, and demo…
• Cyngn DriveMod gets all of your industrial vehicles humming as a single, unified autonomous vehicle fleet so you can work faster for less cost.
• DecisionBee The main lesson is that I've been building something that address a problem that isn't important for my target customers.
• Devver As we’ve begun to wrap things up here at Devver, we’ve had the chance to reflect a bit on our experience. Although shutting down is not the outcome we wanted, it’s clear to both D…
• Diaspora
• DrawQuest (Canvas)
• Echelog Découvrez Echelog.com, la solution idéale pour surveiller, analyser et optimiser vos performances IT grâce à une gestion avancée des logs en temps réel.
• Empiricast
• Enrollem After building and prototyping and working together with prospective customers I finally came to the conclusion that Enrollem, while probably feasible, isn't a business that I want to build.
• Exec
• Fab.com
• Flowise It's with these shifts in mind that we've decided to wind down our operations for Flowise.
• FounderHire Companies hire skills, not mindsets - and being entrepreneurial is a mindset.
• Freshconnect Tarun founded Freshconnect, a B2B marketplace for fresh agricultural produce. They couldn't secure a funding round and were acquired by another
• Friyey With mixed emotions, I share the news of the closure of Friyey, a venture that has been close to my heart for the past 4 years.
• Frobocode
• FrontRow A hobby-learning platform teaching skills from celebrities and experts, backed by Lightspeed.
• Fundercove Here is a shortlist of what went wrong; Incorporated too early. Ignored early red flags, too much optimism. Entrenched incumbents too strong, wrong timing, young industry.
• Gainsight In this session Nick Mehta will share ten significant mistakes he made during his career, and how these failures shaped his journey as CEO of Gainsight.
• Gigpeppers
• GoodWorkLabs From bankrupt to becoming a CEO in the span of 24 hours, watch Vishwas Mudagal delivering an inspiring talk and sharing his success mantra - failure.
• Greenikk Our decision is driven by several key factors, the most significant being that the current model of Greenikk does not support the level of wealth creation we initially envisioned.
• GrowRecruit
• GrowthClub I have spent a year like that going back and forth. Growth stalled, and I was getting demotivated. I was pushing hard but pushing everywhere, in all directions.
• GyanLab After a pilot in 2011 and beta test in 2012, GyanLab in its original form was commercially launched in April 2013.
• Hike After regrouping with our investors and the team, I've made the difficult decision to wind down Hike completely.
• HireVoice Earlier this month, my business partner and I decided to close HireVoice, the business we started in November 2011.
• Httpic I feel that this project gets me nowhere, also it does not feel fun anymore to work on. I've decided to shut it down and focus on something else instead.
• InMobi Naveen Tewari, Founder and CEO, InMobi shares his journey as a keynote speaker from shutting down one company to being India’s first unicorn company at the Fourth Edition of ASCENT Conclave 2019.
• Inovvorx InoVVorX was an app development company. They made $300k from their services, and raised $100k. But they began building their projects and ran out of
• Investmint While we couldn't get to any meaningful stage, Mohit Chitlangia and I are incredibly thankful for the support from our investors, users, and all 30+ phenomenal teammates who gave it their all behind the mission.
• iStream.com The dream run was cut short when it failed to raise the second round of funding and he decided to shut down the portal in May 2013.
• Jobbertunity We built Jobbertunity, a website that helps students organize their job search online – think of it as a CRM tool for job seekers.
• Jobridge Jasmeet built a job board with a unique offline-online model. But their idea was too ahead of time and, due to a bad business model, they had to shut
• Josephine
• Kaitek Labs It’s been a year since then and now that I finally sit down to write This, the real post mortem, the autopsy for my dead child, there’s finally a small sense of peace. It’s over, isn’t it?
• Kiko
• Koo But Koo ran into rough weather and the founders decided to shut down Koo in July 2024, citing financial constraints due to a challenging funding winter.
• Krumzi During the 6 months that it was running, the platform had ~1200 accounts and pretty big interest from job seekers, but unfortunately, it made 0 sales.
• Laska But then I started to realize that instead of focusing my efforts on one thing, I've been spreading my efforts on both platforms and creating two half-assed products as a result.
• Legit Torrents Download free and legal torrents. Music, movies, games, software and more! Legit Torrents is the biggest and best free and legal torrent tracker.
• LFGSS
• Likewise The problem was that I didn't start with solving a problem for my target audience, but that I started building my product first and only then looked for an audience to market it to.
• Logology But the reality is that despite our best efforts, we never found a way to grow beyond survival profitability.
• Longform Longform.org posts great new and classic non-fiction articles, curated from across the
• Macanta After several months of working to secure some funding for Macanta, we have unfortunately had to make the very difficult decision to close down Macanta.
• Marginalia My side-business Marginalia has not done well so I decided to put it out to pasture.
• mChek Shripati Acharya speaks with Sanjay Swamy, former CEO of mChek, about one of India’s earliest attempts at building mobile payments, what it feels like to build ahead of the market, and why timing is often the hardest variable for founders to get right.
• MediConsent Regulatory changes - a court order specified that pre-printed consent forms would be considered invalid.
• Meta Blocks The idea wasn’t working, and no amount of optimism or grit would change that. So we made the only honest call left; return the money.
• Minted It was so bad, she says, that in the first weeks after launch she seriously considered just giving money back to Minted's investors and calling it a day.
• Misfit Sonny Vu, co-founder of Misfit and Elemental Machines, shares learnings drawn from failures experienced at various times, across four different startups spanning the last 20 years of entrepreneurial life.
• Mishra Motors Mishra Motors was to be the premier electric sports bike in India. Time and capital were the causes of its
• Namejax Brand Marketplace Similar to selling logos, selling domains is a challenging business. It's a super competitive space with some big-time players.
• Neta The unfiltered story about founding, scaling & closing a VC-backed startup, with all the lessons learned.
• NextPlay We weren't seeing our revenue scale. Most companies weren't yet willing to pay good money for employee mentorship.
• Nextt My most recent start-up, a mobile planning application known as Nextt, is shutting down. “Starting a company is like throwing yourself off a cliff and assembling an airplane on the way down.” Reid …
• Niki.ai In the next episode of Simulated Reality, we spoke with Sachin Jaiswal, a serial entrepreneur and Ex Co-founder of Niki, about how Niki.ai (India's first chatbot) was conceptualised, how it came to be, and some of his learnings when the company decided to call it quits.
• Ondsel After operating for almost two years, Ondsel has made the difficult decision to cease operations and close down.
• OpenSNP As this blog post is being published, we are sending out emails to all openSNP users with some news: OpenSNP will be turned off – and with that also delete all the data stored on it – on April 30,…
• oratio Exactly one year ago I wrote an internal memo to our team proposing to change our strategy from a short term opportunity to a long term…
• Outbox
• Pagedraw Design your web UI, then use the design directly from code. No more time wasted translating mockups to JSX and CSS. Using Pagedraw is like adding another React developer to your team.
• Parsecco Jackson Solway and Miki Johnson learned this first-hand when they started dating, co-founded Parsecco, got engaged and then shutdown the company.
• Path
• Peppersquare Muki took to entrepreneurship straight after college selling garments from Tirupur . He failed 7 times with his startup and went bankrupt before starting pepper square.
• PepperTap Aswin Ram shares his insights on How excessive funding kills your startup at UnPluggd Winter Edition 2016.
• PeridotOak
• Placemark
• Podsheets The idea was good, but we had too much going on at the time. A podcast hosting business turned out to be more support-intensive than we expected, and we shut it down after realising it was going to be too demanding.
• Pricezombie
• Prosper I'm writing this to reflect on why I won't be working on Prosper anymore. What went wrong? What did I learn? And lastly, what I'm working on next.
• Quesma We had a great team, $2.5 million, and a validated problem. A year later, we sold our IP for parts. Here’s what we learned about urgency and co-foundership.
• Quibi to the employees, investors, and partners who believed in Quibi and made this business possible
• Rdio
• Realty Voice It never got the traction needed to become sustainable. I was never able to figure out the correct product/market fit.
• Reflr An overdue, and self indulgent retrospective on my first startup.
• RethinkDB When we announced that RethinkDB is shutting down, I promised to write a post-mortem. I took some time to process the experience, and I can now write about i...
• Ridejoy Two years after starting Ridejoy, the Y Combinator backed ridesharing community, Jason Shen and his two cofounders chose to wind down operations, returning half of the $1.3M they raised in their seed round.
• Sandstorm Take control of your web by running your own personal cloud server with Sandstorm.
• Savizy We had a dream: allowing anyone to maximize their saving by entering in high return on investment (ROI) Private Equity funds (up to 20%…
• SchoolGennie School management software for Indian schools.
• ScrapingBee In this talk from MicroConf Growth Europe 2021, Pierre de Wulf of ScrapingBee walks through 6 key mistakes he made on his journey from a failed startup to building a profitable SaaS.
• Secret After a lot of thought and consultation with our board, I’ve decided to shut down Secret.
• Self Hosted Git After a few weeks of doing this it became clear this wasn't working. I simply wasn't reaching the people who might want the product. My channels were wrong.
• Shoppe The product lost product market fit, we couldn't find a buyer, and the niche has moved a lot in the last 3.5 years.
• Sidecar Today is a turning point for Sidecar as we prepare to end our ride and delivery service so we can work on strategic alternatives and lay…
• SiteChat About a year ago I built a Chrome extension called SiteChat -- the premise was simple: turn every website into a chatroom. The app was an instant success, and over the following year I watched entire…
• SixXS Sunset, SixXS - IPv6 Deployment and IPv6 Tunnel Broker, helping to deploy IPv6 around the world, IPv6 monitoring, IPv6 routing monitoring, IPv6 coordination, IPv6 Transition
• Slight My best guesses as to why our early stage data startup failed. This isn’t a retrospective, but something closer to advice for past me. Or maybe just exorcism.
• Social Shareup I was a rookie who thought a seemingly good product & a seemingly good technology is all it takes to be a millionaire.
• Standout Jobs A biweekly newsletter on navigating the chaos of building & investing in startups. Topics include venture studios, entrepreneurship, product management, analytics and more, leveraging a combination…
• Stoa School Post pandemic, there was a perceptible dip in the interest for online live-learning due to changing consumer preferences.
• Storylog Share a story that could only come from you. A spiritual experience, unexplained mystery, or an unlikely series of coincidences.
• Subimage
• subtl.ai It really sucks that we have to shut down, but I understand why this happened.
• SuperLearn We set out to make high quality after-school learning affordable to tier2/3 India, however market realities were very different and we took the hard call to shut SuperLearn early this year.
• Supermaven We will provide free autocomplete inference for existing customers for the foreseeable future.
• Swoops This is the story behind Swoops, a fantasy sports company that I co-founded in the fall of 2021, and then wound down two years later.
• Take Eat Easy My co-founders and I created and launched Take Eat Easy in the summer of 2012. Our objective was to enable quality restaurants to provide a…
• TechOzeano We, at TechOzeano, have completed a seven years of startup journey and gathered many experiences.
• The Other Home After our unsuccessful purchase discussion with HomeAway (VRBO), we decided to pull down the shutter in December 2014 to move forward.
• The Punjab Kitchen Amit started a home-made food business with his wife. They invested $1,200/mo to set it up. However, they couldn't compete with competitor's lower
• Thrive After much reflection, we've made the difficult decision to shut down operations for the Thrive Consumer App (currently live in Mumbai).
• Toplyne Despite our best efforts, we couldn't reach the scale or product-market fit we aimed for.
• Tract A postmortem of a startup that attempted to address Britain
• Tutorspree Although we achieved a lot with Tutorspree, we failed to create a scalable business. I've been working through why. In doing so, I’m trying to avoid the sort of hugely broad pronouncements I often...
• Twitpic
• Udayy While the outcome is not what I had hoped for when I started, I have learnt and grown in more ways that I imagined I would.
• Ula But in a candid and deeply honest conversation, Nipun shares - for the first time publicly - the full story of what happened behind the scenes from Ula when he decided to shut down the company and return the remaining capital to investors.
• Upside AI It is much more our own execution failing.
• Veniqa Veniqa - Open-source E-commerce Solution. Built using MEVN Stack (Node.js, Express.js, Vue.js, MongoDB) and more. 100% Code Customizable.
• Vidme Vidme came a long way as an independent platform, but we couldn’t find a path to sustainability. We’re building something new.
• Vocabulary Notebook In this article I share 10 valuable lessons I learned during the two years I led Vocabulary Notebook, my failed startup.
• Walnut
• Wesabe
• Wistia Started 8 years ago, Chris has made a lot of mistakes but he’ll be focusing on three of them that helped to define the company that Wistia has become. While some of these mistakes came close to killing the company, they ended up helping to define the business, the customers and the culture.
• WP Lookout The announcement post summarizes my reasoning, basically that it's not providing enough value to enough people to justify the (relatively small but non-zero) time and expense involved.
• Yik Yak
• Zaplib
• Zirtual First, let me start by telling you a story… Over four years ago I moved to San Francisco from Reno, Nevada, with a backpacker’s pack and the burning desire to turn my blog’s side-business, virtual…

Where these come from

148 of the 203 accounts were published by the founder themselves, on their own site or somewhere they write. Every entry names its source on the card before the headline, because whose words these are is the whole claim. No single publication supplies more than 10% of the library: Failory 3%, SVTV 1%, CB Insights 1%, TEDx Talks 1%, The Failed Founder 1%, TechCrunch 1%, Batko OS 1%, Slush 1%, Y Combinator (YouTube) 1%, Business of Software 1%, Founder Thesis with Akshay Datt 1%, Prime Venture Partners 1%, The Ashish Sinha Show 1%, Polyweb 0%, Tech With Tim 0%, Harvard Alumni Entrepreneurs 0%, Rishit Karia 0%, Every 0%, fail faster 0%, Sammi Tannor Cohen 0%, DjangoCon Europe 0%, First Round Review 0%, Ericson Mendoza 0%, Inc42 0%, Coach Leonardo Ramirez 0%, AIM Network 0%, Minnestar 0%, Entrepreneur 0%, Startup with Jens 0%, IndieFolio 0%, Forbes 0%, Marc Lou 0%, founderpledge.com 0%, Raj Shamani 0%, Kamil Rextin 0%, joy gracia 0%, Oskar Bader | DesignWithValue 0%, Rohit Bhargava 0%, YC Startup Library 0%, Lenny's Newsletter 0%, yourstory.com 0%, SaaStr AI 0%, LinkedIn 0%, Founders Village 0%, Peek 0%, ASCENT Foundation 0%, CNA Insider 0%, Alan Wang 0%, YouTube (Harvard Innovation Labs) 0%, Mike Knapp 0%, Penguin Random House 0%, Matt Munson (CEO, Twenty20) 0%, BetterPlace Mental Health 0%, Entrepreneur India 0%, Kerala Startups 0%, Daniel Midson-Short 0%, Crunchbase News 0%, Build Measure Learn Succeed 0%, Founders Only 0%, Jason M. Lemkin 0%, Value For Startups (valueforstartups.in) 0%, Garry Tan 0%, Ministry of Education Innovation Cell 0%, Burak Buyukdemir 0%, Chris Saad, Startup Snippets 0%, Indian Silicon Valley by Jivraj Singh Sachar 0%, inc42.com 0%, Inverted Passion 0%, Practical Founders - with Greg Head 0%, Myluxtrade Digital Hub 0%, The Startup CEO Show 0%, Matthew Gira 0%, MicroConf 0%, EWOR 0%, Business. Startup. Productivity. 0%, Internet Made Coder 0%, Fintech Takes 0%, James Routledge (founder of Sanctus) 0%, Lenny's Podcast (YouTube) 0%, Rishabh 0%, Mike Ojo 0%, Heavybit 0%, yirenlu.com 0%, and Founders in Motion with Thea Ngo 0%. That ceiling is held by a test rather than by good intentions, because the easy way to grow a corpus is to take more from whoever is easiest to scrape.

Every company here is gone, so its domain eventually lapses and somebody buys it. The links are re-checked and anything that has turned into a parking page or an advert is removed.

Questions, answered