What are some start-up ideas that frequently fail?
- Disrupting Craigslist (or eBay): Hundreds of companies have tried to kill them with hyper local marketplaces... no luck. The best quote I heard about this is: Marketplaces are very hard to build, but impossible to die. But the latest is craigslist is on the decline:
- Dating: Despite more than 5000 dating apps out there, people continue to try different spins. Once in two years there's a hit (howaboutwe, tinder..) and that creates fresh energy.
- Disrupting Amazon: Hundreds of companies try vertical e-commerce to try and take a slice of Amazon but fail.. but apparently Uber might:
- Food delivery: The success of some early companies like Grubhub created many food delivery companies, most of them failed.
- Fashion re-sale: The early wave (Poshmark, Threadflip..) of mobile vertical marketplaces for women's fashion created dozens of companies that raised millions of dollars... most of them failed.
- Photo sharing: I still see a new take on photo sharing, de-duplication, curation... don't know of a single success story other than Instagram.
- Ed-Tech: One of the toughest markets to crack, but hundreds of companies keep trying... direct to consumer, mobile education, a new product for teachers, for schools... only a handful survive(d). .
- Proximity marketing: After Estimote started, hundreds of companies went after (and continue to go after) iBeacon and proximity marketing... hard to get retailers to play...
- HR / Recruiting: Hundreds of new companies every year... assumption is that talent is a big pain point for companies... but companies are flooded with new products, it's very hard to sell to HR.
General failure themes:
- X for Y... Uber and AirBnB succeeded... so Uber for X and AirBnB for X...
- New markets vs existing markets...
- FAD... whisper, secret...
- Start selling to startups (good start, but not sustainable)... but stuck with startups (dead end!) ... SMBs are hard to get to, enterprise is hard to sell to...
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