Colophon
Methodology
Each profile is built in three stages. First, a candidate name is harvested from a public source (Failory, startups.rip, Wikipedia, TechCrunch tag pages, YC batch lists). Second, a research pass collects sources and writes a draft. Third, the author reviews the draft against its sources and accepts, edits, or rejects it.
Sources policy
Every profile needs at least two independent sources. Drafts with fewer than two are auto-tagged low confidence and rendered with a visible badge until the author manually upgrades them. Every factual claim in the post-mortem should map to a cited source. Where a claim is contested, both sides are linked.
Cause-of-death taxonomy
Every profile carries a primary cause and zero or more contributing causes from this fixed v1 vocabulary:
- Ran out of money
- The bank account hit zero before revenue or another raise could close.
- No product–market fit
- Customers never wanted what was being sold, at the price it was being sold for.
- Outcompeted
- A direct competitor reached escape velocity first.
- Founder conflict
- The founders fell out, and the team or product never recovered.
- Bad market timing
- Right idea, wrong decade — too early, or too late.
- Regulatory
- A law, ruling, or enforcement action made the business model untenable.
- Fraud or scandal
- Misrepresentation to investors, customers, or regulators ended the company.
- Pivoted into oblivion
- The company changed direction repeatedly until none of the missions had momentum.
- Key person departure
- A founder or essential operator left, and the remaining team could not carry on.
- Premature scaling
- Hired, marketed, or expanded before the unit economics were proven.
- Acquired then shuttered
- Bought by an acquirer who later shut the product down.
The vocabulary is fixed for v1. New causes land via spec amendment, not ad-hoc additions, so historical filtering remains coherent.
Stack
Astro, MDX, Tailwind, React for the filter islands. Hosted on Cloudflare Pages. Typography is Fraunces, Inter, and JetBrains Mono, all from Google Fonts.