This article written by Mark Henderson of Plancast took a lot of courage. The Uphill Battle Of Social Event Sharing: A Post-Mortem for Plancast | TechCrunch http://j.mp/wCnYov
By putting the words Post-Mortem in the title he made it very clear that the company is failing, a shocking move in our current startup world. So many companies/people/vcs pretend they are succeeding when they are stuck – can’t scale revenues, especially over the past 5 years or so. Once they finally shut it down they often still claim success, or invoke the over-used “pivot” panacea.
By calling it as it is, Mr. Henderson allows a true discussion about what went wrong and other strategies that could possibly change the fate of Plancast and other startups in the same position. He is also helping other startup leaders and investors to possibly follow his lead of raw honesty, so this industry can focus more resources on a smaller number of companies that truly have something special and defendable. That helps people to better learn how to do it right, contribute to bigger better businesses, create profits.
In several of my past postings I’ve touched on this problem. It’s endemic to the startup world right now, and can’t lead to a good future. Of course startups always have a low probability of success anyway, but this current environment of pretending like every company that gets angel or super-angel seed funding is made up of geniuses with genius ideas is a house of cards. Articles like that above could start the process of correcting the market back to realism and eventually streamline resources. Mark has put his ego aside and done a great service to all of us. And who knows, by publishing the companies issues he may crowd source some answers (and funding) to actually save his company.
Here are some of the comments people made about this article:
“I hope TechCrunch publishes more well-composed articles like this in the future.”
“This industry is lacking such honest analysis. Thanks for keeping everything so real.”
“I greatly respect you posting this as a way to help others learn when you could have just disappeared in the startup abyss.”
Ii looks like the beginning of several who will come forward soon. What’s the lesson here? I guess more journalists should launch startups. @tomnora