Failure has patterns too

If you study products that didn’t make it, the same reasons keep coming up. Not unique disasters. The same mistakes, in different costumes, repeating across years and categories.

That’s both depressing and useful. Depressing because so many failures could have been avoided. Useful because the patterns are knowable — and if you’re aware of them, you can act earlier to stay clear of them yourself.

This topic walks through the most common reasons products fail. Not to be discouraging, but to give you a checklist of risks to take seriously as you build.

No real problem

By far the most common reason products fail: they’re solving a problem that wasn’t real, or wasn’t painful enough.

The founder imagined the problem mattered. They built carefully. They launched. Users tr...

Why products fail (and what you can learn)