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That depends entirely on your financial structure, your product, and your own lifespan. If you never on-board investors and never depend on a loss-leader strategy for capturing market, you can small-business yourself from you mid-twenties to retirement and beyond. A lot of trade professions do exactly this sort of slow expansion; my neighbors is self-employed plumber and he's been routing tubs for the past two decades.
Jaiku, Pownce, Gowalla, Bing/MSN search, Posterous, Windows Phone There are tons of them. You'll see a lot of responses that claim all of these companies didn't die due to moving slowly, but for other reasons - that will also always be true though, even in cases where a startup moved too slow. For example, Windows Phone was both backwards, and slow to match the iPhone once it became obvious consumers loved touch. In…
Plaxo - lost to LinkedIn
Bebo - social media space became too crowded
Geocities - died of natural causes
Netscape - slow to adopt after v3
If the growth rate is slower (or faster) than the optimal growth rate then the management has made a mistake (assuming they have any control over this). When you frame it this way what you are asking is have any startups failed for making mistakes which is does not need to be answered. What you are really asking is it possible to workout in real-time (no hindsight) what the optimal growth rate should be for each comp…
No, what they're asking for is concrete examples. Real-life examples are always more illuminating than theoretical discussions.
The more important question to answer is how can you work out what the optimal growth rate should be of any startup.
Digg, Delicious, Mixx - lost to reddit Plaxo - lost to LinkedIn Bebo - social media space became too crowded Geocities - died of natural causes Netscape - slow to adopt after v3
This Google trends line is interesting: https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=slack%2C%20hipchat%2...
I'd argue that HipChat, Campfire and Yammer all "lost" to Slack because they weren't moving fast enough. This Google trends line is interesting: https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=slack%2C%20hipchat%2...
Digg, Delicious, Mixx - lost to reddit Plaxo - lost to LinkedIn Bebo - social media space became too crowded Geocities - died of natural causes Netscape - slow to adopt after v3
Delicious was a different product from Digg or Reddit, so that doesn't make sense.