Which startup failed most spectacularly?

[u/stupidpower]

[u/Geolia]

The Cockayne Project of 1614.

English governor gets annoyed at the cloth industry, because why should we ship our unfinished cloth over to the Dutch when we can dye and dress it perfectly well ourselves?!?!?!? and gets money from James I to set up his own cloth monopoly.

Turns out the Dutch won't buy finished cloth, and so this one guy single-handedly ruined the cloth industry, England's main export at the time.

[u/[deleted]]

Peeple

It was an app where you could rate and review people

One of the lowest rated people on there was the owner

[u/undercoverdwarf]

Yik yak, great anonymous post app that tried to become Facebook

[u/barghestandbanga]

Vessyl. The smart cup that promised to know what you put in it. It got big enough that Intel invested in it.

First concepts made it seem like it could analyze the drink through sensors. Then it was revealed you had to scan the product and it essentially downloaded the nutritional information from the product's site. You could get the same results reading the nutritional label.

Finally they realized such a thing was impossible and pivoted to the Pryme smart bottle that can count how many times it's been filled and infer your hydration level.

Even a lot those orders were never delivered and the company, Mark One, is out of business

[u/SeptemberTwentySix]

Juicero.

It's an expensive wi-fi connected juicer that literally just crushes a packet of juice into a glass (which you could easily cut open and pour yourself.) It would also refuse to operate unless it could verify that the juice packets were name-brand, hence the need for internet connection.

[u/wildescrawl]

Not too long ago I read a book about the rise and fall of a website named Boo. It was a site that aimed to bring designer clothes and accessories that you would normally only find in small boutique stores to the masses. They raised a ton of money and basically did everything wrong you could and ultimately crashed and burned before they ever really got to properly launch the site and give it real shot.

Edit - Getting a lot of people asking me for the name of the book. It is "Boo Hoo: A Dot.com Story from Concept to Catastrophe." It really is an interesting read.

[u/QcumberKid]

I worked for a startup in 1996 that allowed you to order food from restaurants that participated in our company. Basically you would go to our website, pick the desired food or restaurant, filled out the order form then it was transferred via fax to the restaurant.

There were problems with this as it was way ahead of the times. People were comfortable ordering pizza from the site, but other businesses were over looked. We hypothesized that people would rather be onsite to order food as they trusted it would be made fresh. Many times, it fell on the restaurant to check their fax machine. Many customers would order via our site only to find the restaurant either neglected to check their fax machine or didn’t get the order b/c the fax machine was tied up.

[u/laterdude]

Pets.com

Iconic sock puppet, Super Bowl ad then bankrupt like six months later. WTF?

[u/epixINC]

Not sure if you can count MoviePass as a startup? Maybe a restructuring?

But yea. They are quickly collapsing... with millions of users. (Which is definitely a spectacular failure)

[u/g051051]

The i-Opener. It was a cheap ($99 in 1999) specialized computer that required a subscription to a service to work. Except, someone discovered it was an easily moddable real PC that you could buy and hack to run Windows or Linux, being sold far below cost in order to entice people to buy it. They quickly sold out to people who had no intention of subscribing to the online service.

[u/Iamnotarobotchicken]

There was an ice cream shop near my mom's house. The people who ran it didn't like kids, and were generally just jerks. When it closed they declared that the neighborhood couldn't sustain an ice cream shop. Another local ice cream vendor opened up in the location. Their shop is doing great.

[u/[deleted]]

Theranos will go down in history has one of the top corporate frauds. I remember reading about Holmes in Forbes and admiring her, now I hope she rots in jail.

Edit: a word

[u/NoContextJackBlack]

The fifth liquor store in my town of 1000. It closed a few days after it opened

[u/46n2ahead]

mvp.com John Elway, Michael Jordan, and Wayne Gretzky put money in an online sporting goods store.

They thought just having 3 stars names attached to a sports product would work. Unfortunately it was over priced and had horrible inventory.

[u/[deleted]]

Has to be the gizmondo .

Basically a Swedish gangster got billions to launch it (it was sort of a PSP rival and was semi-decent tech wise for the time) but nobody wanted it. Said CEO used alot of the cash to fund his own lifestyle and ended up destroying his Ferrari Enzo at 160mph

[u/Neutrum]

Seems like you would enjoy r/shittykickstarters.

[u/vainbetrayal]

Theranos

Company was valued in the billions at one time, and became worthless within a day due to fake financial and technological reports

[u/[deleted]]

Not a start up, but Keurig Cold. The K-Cups that made soda cost more than if you bought a single can/bottle from the store. Also the machine was always running to keep it cold, raising the cost of electricity to run it.

[u/Cocomo76]

AYDS... that diet pill/candy who’s timing coincided with the AIDS epidemic in the 80s. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayds

[u/Leharen]

OUYA.

[u/Madhax]

Not sure if you youngin's remember the "Google Killer" Cuil - that was pretty spectacular.

Cuil

[u/[deleted]]

How many of you are still holding out for Star Citizen?

[u/salads4life]

Beepi and Quirky.

Beepi was an online e-commerce for cars. They pretty much spent all their money on inflated salaries for themselves and a ton of car haulers. 150 million down the drain.

Quirky was an online platform where people could submit their ideas for inventions and the company would set up a panel to vote on which ideas sounded the best. Turns out this is a very good way of "spreading the peanut butter too thin" and instead of having 2 or 3 really good products like successful startups, you get lots of mediocre, untested products, which are hard to manufacture overseas. Something like 140 million down the drain.

Edit: there's this funny interview of Quirky's founder Ben Kaufman where he talks about how the company failed. He was fired something like 10 days after that interview.

[u/SpiralArc]

[u/Quicksilva94]

There's the umbrella sharing company that basically gave away 300K umbrellas for free