Why not founding it again? A crutial point of a startup success is timing. Maybe this is a case of founder's timing. Founders all the time decide to pivot or persevere. And sometimes, to quit. Why it has to be a permanent quit? Three years and a good amount of experience laters, the founder can make it happen! I think we may face a failed startup as something you shut down, that is not demanding any more of your time and money. But not something you must never again touch. Not dead, but hibernating.

Soneca, you are absolutely right. In this case, we shut it down, and my co-founder decided to move on. This just wasn't meant to be. After that, I decided to team up with a different friend of mine, and we are working on LaunchBit. So, while that was the end for Parrotview, it's not the end of my startup journey. :)

Congrats, hippo! I should have guessed though, no one shares tough insights of self-awareness, unless he already have overcame it. :)

I don't know if there was much you could do with a product like that. I don't know who that would appeal to. Was it basically Google Hangouts for shopping?

Sounds like an excellent idea to me ;-)

Walk around a mall. Watch the number of people using their phones to take photos, talk to their friends about options, phoning home to check they're getting the right thing, etc.

They're all young teenagers. Is that a great revenue model?

I dunno. Depends on whether you can do interesting things with 'em.

For example - you build the social hot-or-not for clothes purchases. How much is the data from that worth to a high-street retailer as a way to guide their pricing and stocking decisions.

(and - come to that - I see folk well out of their teen years doing this. Women especially in clothing stores... and what is the purchasing power of groups who are rich enough to afford smart phones in the first place)

Just gotta wait out ten years to see the revenue. Which is why traditionally it's big corporations that could handle investing into advertising of the youths.

If I were to do that all over again, I would've focused on building an audience around a pinterest-like blog or FB page with cool retail items so that we would've had people to launch to.

My hearty thanks to the author for being so frank about this.

+1 Some good info here. Thanks for posting! Things everyone puts off, but really make a difference.

Same. Especially for "I didn’t build an audience"

Great advice. Thanks for sharing. I'm working on my own project and know that the failures you note are universal. It's helpful to hear them again and use it to channel my efforts on building an audience especially when development is slow.

It seems to me the main reason for this failed startup is lack of marketing. I am in the middle of building/promoting a startup company and the first batch of customer seems very quite difficult to attract.

I am wondering here what more can be done about researching/developing that revene model. Anyone have links, thoughts, whatever?

Thanks for sharing this.