Founders share their startup fails in spreadsheets

Ever seen a successful founder and assume they just got lucky? Maybe some luck has been involved but more often than not they have plugged away at lots of ideas before hitting on one that became successful. The other day, a bunch of indie founders started sharing spreadsheet screenshots of their many projects, which mostly involved lots of fails along the way.

Pat Walls

Here's Pat Walls sharing his many wins and fails before and after his successful Starter Story website:

Marc Köhlbrugge

Marc Köhlbrugge replied to Pat's tweet with his own list. Some really interesting sites there like SP Forums for music producers and 100 under 100, where people paid to be put on a leaderboard website (myself included, lol):

My list of failed startups

I added my own list of graveyard startups. You can see some clear "inspiration" from Scott's Cheap Flights in 2018 😅 I tried some communities but these are really hard work. Most of them were ones I spent a few months on. I think most founders quit an idea too late instead of too early.  

Some of my dead ideas became re-branded or carried on in some form in new ideas. High Signal used to have a community but I closed it - but it lives on as my newsletter for founder news. I'm also doing more work as a Twitter ghost writer now.

Cory Zue

Cory Zue from SaaS Pegasus (affiliate), a Django boiler plate which makes $100k a year, joined in as well with his list of past attempts at startup success:

Francesco Di Lorenzo

Then I saw Francesco from Typefully (affiliate) share his journey

Dominic Monn

Dominic from MentorCruise shared all his wins and fails as well. He has had an impressive amount of sales!

I guess this all shows that you might need to work as a founder for years and try lots of ideas before you get lucky so don't compare yourself to other entrepreneurs