Ask HN: Examples of startups that failed due to moving slowly?

Post by vacri » Thu, Jul 09, 2015, 6:38 AM UTC

Post by seivan » Thu, Jul 09, 2015, 6:39 AM UTC

vuyani wrote: post #39

mijustin wrote: post #28

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...

I honestly believe Slack got big so fast because of their awesome awesome campaign advert. Just like the dollar shave club ad too. Some startups forget that the first impression and cool factor still play a big role in creating a huge buzz about your app.

Post by GBond » Thu, Jul 09, 2015, 6:50 AM UTC

Post by Ntrails » Thu, Jul 09, 2015, 9:02 AM UTC

zaidf wrote: post #37

lkrubner wrote: post #31

"Failed" sometimes means bankruptcy, but you should also include those companies that survived but remained tiny, while one of their competitors became huge. Circa 1995, many companies tried online retailing, but none of them could match the speed of Amazon, and so Amazon slowly won out over all of them. MySpace lost to Facebook, partly by not matching what became popular features on Facebook, such as "The Wall". And…

MySpace lost to Facebook, partly by not matching what became popular features on Facebook, such as "The Wall" That is a gross over simplification of why MySpace lost to facebook. One of the main reasons I think MySpace lost was that they never seemed to have a grand vision like Zuck and fb seemed to have developed around '06-07. Not to mention, MySpace was an offshoot of a super shady marketing company, not a technol…

    -Click on myspace page
    -Wait 10 secs for background to load
    -Really loud obnoxious music is playing
    -Animated page background starts going
    -Quizzes load
    -A wild photograph appears
    -You can see an embedded youtube now - hit pause
    -It wasn't the goddamned youtube making the noise, now you've got two things running you idiot
    -Try and pause the youtube again
    -page freezes
    -audio player loads
    -manage to stop everything playing
    -have epileptic fit from background
    -forget why you came here anyway

Post by dagw » Thu, Jul 09, 2015, 9:17 AM UTC

adventured wrote: post #16

MCRed wrote: post #8

I am aware of multiple companies that died because they were forced to "grow too fast", rather than growing slow. One was a search engine ahead of google in its category that would have been an ideal google acquisition target (in fact, google is still doing a poor job in their area of search.) Another was a company that invented a key gaming technology, but was ahead of the market by a couple years. In both cases the…

10 out of 10 VCs would take the six year $1 billion acquisition over the two year $30 million acquisition in fact. Your numbers are way off. It would have to be closer to $500 million in two years, versus $1 billion in six.