I’ve been building a database of successful companies

5 years ago, after failing with a startup idea and being rejected from YC, I started interviewing founders with the hopes of learning what it takes to find a good idea and build a successful business.

I posted these case studies online (started as a side project) and eventually it turned into a business, and started making enough money for me to go full time on it (starterstory.com).

For the last 5 years I’ve been collecting data for each company we interview, such as revenue, startup costs, age of the company, gross margin, what channels they used to grow, and a ton more.

I’ve put all of this into a searchable, sortable, filterable database and I wanted to get HN’s opinion on the tool, and if you find the data / information useful? Also, would love to hear what other data points you think we should be collecting, or features we should add!

The tool is built with Rails, Postgres database, search functionality using Elasticsearch, and it’s hosted on Heroku.

I’ve been building a database of successful companies
starterstory.com

This is neat. I wonder if there's a way to cull the Idea list, though? There's a lot to go through at the moment, and some entries are listed twice (i.e. Blog).

Isn't this a massive case of survivorship bias?

It probably has a nice React front end and Stripe for payment processing, so that would put it in the startup bucket :)

I have come across this website that interviews failed founders. Looks like nthey pivoted to now doing both failed and successful but they def. started focussing on failed founders:

https://www.failory.com/

https://www.failory.com/graveyard