Why do many new web startups, with great ideas, valuable assets and deep motivation, fail? What are the major mistakes startups commit leading them to failure? What can be done to prolong the life of a startup rather than bring its business life to a guaranteed end?

It’s sad: the percentage of failed startups. It’s almost depressing! Even years ago, going back to the 90’s, it seems that startups have been failing continuously yet more discretely since social media channels and Web 2.0 were not in play!

A Table of Web Companies that Vanished!

Now many of you out there will think: why should I consider opening my own startup when there’s a 50-50% chance that it’s going to fail? Why not just apply for a stable company and settle for being an employee with a steady income? I beg to differ, the remaining successful 50% could be perceived positively! What failing startups lacked is the ability to learn from the mistakes of the many others! Yet now, with the abundant availability of failure stories, both online and offline, it has become easier to learn from the mistakes of others and try hard to avoid them.

So here’s what I’m going to do for this particular post: I’m going to choose a list of startups that failed and point out their mistakes clearly, explaining how they could be avoided in future ventures.

1. Simplicity Does Not Substitute for Functionality!
   • AlmondRocks (as we were able to conclude from the little resources we found) created blogs that were too simple that they were actually useless!
2. Don’t Underestimate Competition:
   • TinFinger Took their competition, Wikipedia – one of the top ten websites worldwide- lightly. They also concentrated on the technical side of the interface (RDF triples and semantic web) rather than the friendliness of the user experience.
   • Feedster, a search engine which seems to have been resurrected then killed again, is yet another example of underestimating competition, in this case: Google!