When you come up with a startup you cannot be certain about its success. In fact, 90 percent of the startups fail before they could become a shining star.
Some startups face a massive failure despite a great idea behind it, due to various reasons. In fact, sometimes even the most useful and seemingly revolutionary of the ideas turn out to be a massive failure.
Read this article to know about myriad factors that lead to the failure of startups which were initiated with great ideas.
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Table of Contents
HAILO
Hailo, a mobile application for calling cabs using your smartphone. It was similar to Uber but in place of having black cars with drivers, it connects you to the network of yellow cabs. It came into existence in 2011 in London and was doing really great until 2013 with over 100 million dollars invested in it. However, by the end of 2014, it crashed down drastically due to the following reasons:
- Intense competition in the market. It faced stiff competition, especially from UBER.
- A flawed business model was another reason. A London based start-up could not cope up with the market of New York. The owners did not do much market research and suffered a failure.
It can be summed up that the major reason for its failure was imperfect marketing strategy and poor insight of targeting the correct audience.
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GOVWORKS
Founded way back in 1998, Govworks(dot)com facilitated to connect the government with their clients. The concept was to facilitate the users with the payment and use of government’s producers and laws. Using this, clients would have been able to keep a track of their contracts, apply for jobs, pay tickets or hunt for city information. The corporate was doing fine and grew from 8 to a couple of 50 employees in 2 years.
Unfortunately, it too encountered failure, due to various reasons mentioned below:
- There have been some problems amongst the founders, who were actually childhood friends.
- Additionally, they offended a number of the government officers.
- Their company software had few bugs that they weren’t able to fix. Because of all this, the corporate was sold in Gregorian calendar month 2001.
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DOORMINT
India encompasses an immense population of 1.2 billion individuals. It’s undoubtedly a good marketplace for a laundry business. This was the concept behind the beginning of Doormint. They served on demand laundry services to people of Mumbai, Bangalore, and Gurgaon. The start-up was doing fine in the initial stage however presently things became unmanageable.
There were several reasons for the failure. Some of them are:
- Many of the middle category people have a house servant who along with washing garments performs different household chores in a much lesser time as compared to Doormint.
- Also, there have been problems like low price ticket size, pickup delivery value, and quality management. They were unable to perform a decent budget management.
It can be summed up that the founders of Doormint failed to take into account all the factors before releasing their product. Or rather they unnoticed the factors like a household maid or the local dhobi. They created many assumptions concerning the matter that went wrong during the execution. Therefore it’s a recommendation to do an extensive research and analysis beforehand.
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EVERPIX
Everpix came up with a concept to sort and organize your photos in online storage. you need not trawl through many photos to look up for a specific shot. They used an explicit algorithmic program to sort and organize your pictures. Started in 2009, it managed around 55,000 users by 2012, however, broke down by 2013.
It failed thanks to a pair of major problems:
- Though the app was simple to use, had a clean style with ample functionalities, however nice product don’t come at low-cost rates. By the time it entered the market, the corporate was out of cash as well as time to boost the capital. Because of this, they could not manage a sustainable number of users.
- Because of this shortage of capital, they required to sell their app to the users to boost funds however they decided to not.
From their failure, others got to perceive that you have to be compelled to market your product. Though the aim is to deliver a product to the users, you also need cash to run your business. In such a competitive world, you need to do serious marketing backing your product.
Final words:
These were examples of some of the startup failures. But you do not need to be worried seeing their failure, you just need to learn from their mistakes, and plan and formulate your startup accordingly that suits the market in which you are going to launch it.