The Top 20 Reasons Startups Fail
From lack of product-market fit to disharmony on the team, we break down the top 20 reasons for startup failure by analyzing 101 startup failure post-mortems.
This is excerpted from a long-form overview of startup failure. See the full report on our Research Portal.
After we compiled our list of startup failure post-mortems, one of the most frequent requests we got was to use these posts to figure out the main reasons startups failed.
Startups, corporations, investors, economic development folks, academics, and journalists all wanted some insight into the question:
“What are the reasons startups fail?”
So we gave those post-mortems the CB Insights’ data treatment to see if we could answer this question.
After reading through every single of the 101 postmortems, we’ve learned there is rarely one reason for a single startup’s failure. However, we did begin to see a pattern to these stories.
And so after sifting through the post-mortems, we identified the top 20 reasons startups failed.
Since many startups offered multiple reasons for their failure, you’ll see the chart highlighting the top 20 reasons doesn’t add up to 100% (it far exceeds it).
Following the chart is an explanation of each reason and relevant examples from the postmortems.
There is certainly no survivorship bias here. But many very relevant lessons for anyone in the entrepreneurial ecosystem.
It’s worth noting that this type of data-driven analysis would not be possible without a number of founders being courageous enough to share stories of their startup’s demise with the world. So a big thank you to them.
Not pivoting away or quickly enough from a bad product, a bad hire, or a bad decision was cited as a reason for failure in 7% of the post mortems. Dwelling or being married to a bad idea can sap resources and money as well as leave employees frustrated by a lack of progress.
As Keith Nowak writes in Imercive’s post-mortem:
“We were caught mid-pivot — half way between a strategy we knew wouldn’t work and one which we believed could be successful but was not able to be aggressively pursued. This was a very difficult place to be both professionally and personally. We were extremely frustrated at not being able to properly go after our new strategy and every day that passed without meaningful progress was one step closer to the failure of my first company. Even though we put everything we had into getting through this phase we were never able to make it through the pivot.”
Work-life balance is not something that startup founders often get and so the risk of burning out is high. Burn out was given as a reason for failure 8% of the time The ability to cut your losses where necessary and re-direct your efforts when you see a dead end was deemed important to succeeding and avoiding burnout, as was having a solid, diverse, and driven team so that responsibilities can be shared.
We often hear about startup entrepreneurs lamenting their lack of network or investor connections so we were surprised to see that one of the reasons for failure was entrepreneurs who said they did not properly utilize their own network.
As Kiko wrote,
“Get your investors involved. Your investors are there to help you. Get them involved from the start, and don’t be afraid to ask for help. I think we made the mistake early on of trying to do (and know) everything ourselves, perhaps out of insecurity over being so new to the business world. This is a mistake.”
Sometimes a startup can evolve from a simple idea to a world of legal complexities that can prove to be a core cause of shutting down.
As Decide.com wrote in their post-mortem,
“We received a notice from them informing us we weren’t compliant and unless we removed it they’d suspend our affiliate account. We weren’t making a lot of money but that account probably represented more than 80% our revenue.”
A couple of music startup post-mortems also associated the high costs of dealing with record labels and legal headaches as a reason for startup failure.
High-profile startup Turntable.fm wrote,
“Ultimately, I didn’t heed the lessons of so many failed music startups. It’s an incredibly expensive venture to pursue and a hard industry to work with. We spent more than a quarter of our cash on lawyers, royalties and services related to supporting music. It’s restrictive. We had to shut down our growth because we couldn’t launch internationally.”
Tying to the more common reason of running out of cash, a number of startup founders explicitly cited a lack of investor interest either at the seed follow-on stage (the Series A Crunch) or at all.
Location was an issue in a couple of different ways. The first was that there has to be congruence between your startup’s concept and location.
As Meetro wrote,
“We launched our product and got all of our friends in Chicago on it. We then had the largest papers in the area do nice detailed write-ups on us. Things were going great …The problem we would soon find out was that having hundreds of active users in Chicago didn’t mean that you would have even two active users in Milwaukee, less than a hundred miles away, not to mention any in New York or San Francisco. The software and concept simply didn’t scale beyond its physical borders.”
Location also played a role in failure for remote teams. The key being that if your team is working remotely, make sure you find effective communication methods, otherwise lack of teamwork and planning could lead to failure.
As Devver wrote,
“The most significant drawback to a remote team is the administrative hassle. It’s a pain to manage payroll, unemployment, insurance, etc in one state … for a small team, it was a major annoyance and distraction.”
There are many good ideas out there in the world, but 9% of startup post-mortem founders found that a lack of passion for a domain and a lack of knowledge of a domain were key reasons for failure no matter how good an idea is.
In their post-mortem, NewsTilt candidly spoke about their lack of interest in the domain they selected — writing:
“I think it’s fair to say we didn’t really care about journalism. We started by building a commenting product which came from my desire for the perfect commenting system for my blog. This turned into designing the best damn commenting system ever, which led to figuring out an ideal customer: newspapers…
“But we didn’t really care about journalism, and weren’t even avid news readers. If the first thing we did every day was go to news.bbc.co.uk, we should have been making this product. But even when we had NewsTilt, it wasn’t my go-to place to be entertained, that was still Hacker News and Reddit. And how could we build a product that we were only interested in from a business perspective.”
Pivots like Burbn to Instagram or ThePoint to Groupon can go extraordinarily well. Or they can start you down the wrong road.
As Flowtab’s post-mortem explains,
“Pivoting for pivoting’s sake is worthless. It should be a calculated affair, where changes to the business model are made, hypotheses are tested, and results are measured. Otherwise, you can’t learn anything.”
Discord with a cofounder was a fatal issue for startup post-mortem companies. But acrimony isn’t limited to the founding team, and when things go bad with an investor, it can get ugly pretty quickly as evidenced in the case of ArsDigital.
Phillip Greenspun writes:
“For roughly one year Peter Bloom (General Atlantic), Chip Hazard (Greylock), and Allen Shaheen (CEO) exercised absolute power over ArsDigita Corporation. During this year they
- spent $20 million to get back to the same revenue that I had when I was CEO
- declined Microsoft’s offer (summer 2000) to be the first enterprise software company with a .NET product …
- deprecated the old feature-complete product (ACS 3.4) before finishing the new product (ACS 4.x) …
- created a vastly higher cost structure; I had 80 people mostly on base salaries under $100,000 and was bringing in revenue at the rate of $20 million annually. The ArsDigita of Greylock, General Atlantic, and Allen had nearly 200 with lots of new executive positions at $200,000 or over …
- surrendered market leadership and thought leadership”
Getting sidetracked by distracting projects, personal issues, and/or general loss of focus was mentioned in 13% of stories as a contributor to failure.
As MyFavorites wrote at the end of their startup experience,
“Ultimately when we came back from SXSW, we all started losing interest, the team was all wondering where this was eventually going, and I was wondering if I even wanted to run a startup, have investors, have the responsibility of employees and answering to a board of investors.”
If you release your product too early, users may write it off as not good enough and getting them back may be difficult if their first impression of you is negative. And if you release your product too late, you may have missed your window of opportunity in the market.
As a Calxeda employee said,
“In [Calxeda’s] case, we moved faster than our customers could move. We moved with tech that wasn’t really ready for them — ie, with 32-bit when they wanted 64-bit. We moved when the operating-system environment was still being fleshed out — [Ubuntu Linux maker] Canonical is all right, but where is Red Hat? We were too early.”
Want to see the breakdown of the Top 10 reasons for startup failure? You can see the full report and other startup postmortems on our Research Portal.
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