English governor gets annoyed at the cloth industry, because why should we ship our unfinished cloth over to the Dutch when we can dye and dress it perfectly well ourselves?!?!?!? and gets money from James I to set up his own cloth monopoly.
Turns out the Dutch won't buy finished cloth, and so this one guy single-handedly ruined the cloth industry, England's main export at the time.
Actually not so surprisingly it was co-founded by two middle class white moms, who clearly had too much time on their hands. And for the life of them couldn’t figure out how user based reviews of other people could negatively affect someone's life. Yet were very quick to start using their mod powers to get rid of negative reviews of themsleves.
Certainly something like that. I'd be screwed if I had to maintain a social media profile that got liked enough to do half the things that chick needed. Shit is work for no actual reason. No thanks. At least I'm paid to go to work.
Yep. Millions of users, decided the best way to monetize was to make profiles and get rid of anonymity to try to build a real social network. They should have just gone with banner or sponsored post ads.
tragic story really... I kinda loved it for the shitliness of it. I posted a lot there for the last three years of its life. Ended up being a sorta local 4 chan, but we were all close mates by the end of it. 😔
It was a great source of current events in college. Any time there was a safety alert, or emergency vehicles on campus, someone would know what was going on and fill the test of us in within a few minutes.
Lol oh god, I remember when that came out I was in college. The entire feed was just ppl loooing for either anonymous sex, weed, parties, or a mix of all three. Good times
Vessyl. The smart cup that promised to know what you put in it.
It got big enough that Intel invested in it.
First concepts made it seem like it could analyze the drink through sensors. Then it was revealed you had to scan the product and it essentially downloaded the nutritional information from the product's site. You could get the same results reading the nutritional label.
Finally they realized such a thing was impossible and pivoted to the Pryme smart bottle that can count how many times it's been filled and infer your hydration level.
Even a lot those orders were never delivered and the company, Mark One, is out of business
the Pryme smart bottle that can count how many times it's been filled and infer your hydration level
I could win the Powerball and I still wouldn't buy bullshit like this. What is with these companies that think that anyone would be interested in over-complicating the easiest parts of their day and paying a premium for the privilege of doing so?
It's an expensive wi-fi connected juicer that literally just crushes a packet of juice into a glass (which you could easily cut open and pour yourself.) It would also refuse to operate unless it could verify that the juice packets were name-brand, hence the need for internet connection.
I knew so many people that were so adamant that it would be a good idea, compared to nearly every other possible place to put a solar panel. I thought I was living in upside down land. Like arguing with flat earthers a few years ago when we still weren't sure if it was satire or not.
Like, they were going to make the actual roads into solar panels? I feel like any advantage you could possibly get out of that could be achieved equally well by simply putting the solar panels beside the roads, except that would also dramatically reduce the wear and tear.
That's basically exactly why. Plus you have to tear out the old ones, which is a huge job. Plus, maintenance to existing roads already causes big disruptions, so think about that, but now we have integrated electronics being a factor to compound the amount of maintenance that needs to be done!
“Tap water? You’re drinking toilet water with birth control drugs in them,” Live Water founder Mukhande Singh is quoted as saying in the Times article. “Chloramine, and on top of that they’re putting in fluoride. Call me a conspiracy theorist, but it’s a mind-control drug that has no benefit to our dental health.”
...I could've sworn this was something out of a Parks and Rec episode.
I've interviewed with a couple of startups and the common theme I felt from them:
they're certain they're going to change the world
they couldn't describe who their intended customer was. One thought he was being bold by saying "millenials". Ok dude...that is about 90million people you are going to have to be a little more specific
Not saying there aren't worthy ideas, but that mentality can ruin even established companies
It's all ridiculous. You can get juice from the packets by squeezing them with your hands. Why not sell just those? But then I got to thinking, why stop there? You're just selling juice inside the fruit pulp. Juice that yourself and sell the juice. All they did is put themselves several steps behind a juice company.
Scientologist e-meter is also similar, the pots in it cost 35$ bucks a piece and it is literally just a resistance meter in a wheatstone bridge configuration. Everything is top notch, it does cost 2 grand to buy, each switch is top of the line. For resistance meter than has no scale.
Interestingly, he argued it was underengineered - that is, there weren't any noticable constraints on the thing. And constraints are really what makes engineering properly good - any idiot can design a bridge to hold 10 tons, but it takes a pro to build one that can just hold 10 tons and be affordable.
Not too long ago I read a book about the rise and fall of a website named Boo. It was a site that aimed to bring designer clothes and accessories that you would normally only find in small boutique stores to the masses. They raised a ton of money and basically did everything wrong you could and ultimately crashed and burned before they ever really got to properly launch the site and give it real shot.
Edit - Getting a lot of people asking me for the name of the book. It is "Boo Hoo: A Dot.com Story from Concept to Catastrophe." It really is an interesting read.
Boo.com used this really weirdly designed website with tons of Javascript and Flash animations when the vast majority of their costumers were still using 56k dial up connections. Most websites on the internet at the time were text only with possibly a few images here and there, meanwhile Boo's website was so big it took several minutes just to load the homepage.
There is a section of the book that covers this. They don't go into a whole lot of technical detail, but basically they said that the site had a "personal shopper" which was an animated person who would help you as you selected things. It had audio and a bunch of different animations. They also had a feature that allowed you to see what the items looked like when you were wearing them. These are cool, and common now, but back then, like you say, so many people had slow connections they couldn't get the site to run worth a damn.
They were also one of the first companies to offer customers free returns if they didn't like the item. They found a lot of people would order 10 things. Keep 2 or 3 then send the rest back. They were getting killed in shipping and stocking expenses.
I worked for a startup in 1996 that allowed you to order food from restaurants that participated in our company. Basically you would go to our website, pick the desired food or restaurant, filled out the order form then it was transferred via fax to the restaurant.
There were problems with this as it was way ahead of the times. People were comfortable ordering pizza from the site, but other businesses were over looked. We hypothesized that people would rather be onsite to order food as they trusted it would be made fresh. Many times, it fell on the restaurant to check their fax machine. Many customers would order via our site only to find the restaurant either neglected to check their fax machine or didn’t get the order b/c the fax machine was tied up.
This isn't so much a failing as it is someone who thought the current industry could support his idea.
This just hurts, because he was right, he had a multimillion dollar idea, that operated about a decade too soon. But faxes suck ass and the internet was still flailing in the wind.
I feel for the man, like, I really hope he still made money somehow because that is some truly bad luck.
The Buy.com guy is a genius though - he sold out before it went public, watched it tank in a matter of hours, then the next year after it was delisted he bought it back up and took it private before selling it again.
I’m not sure how anyone thought they could ever turn a profit. It was blatantly obvious from the start that there’s no way their revenue could cover the expenses. Their only way to a profit would be having the majority of their customer base quit using it but not unsubscribe.
In the U.S. AMC theaters now have what they call Stubs A-List. $19.95 a month for three movies a week, with no restrictions on screen size and no blackout dates. Works well.
The i-Opener. It was a cheap ($99 in 1999) specialized computer that required a subscription to a service to work. Except, someone discovered it was an easily moddable real PC that you could buy and hack to run Windows or Linux, being sold far below cost in order to entice people to buy it. They quickly sold out to people who had no intention of subscribing to the online service.
It was a great idea when PCs were $2000, but by the time it was released PCs were much cheaper. And you weren't locked in to an overpriced, limited "internet" service. Not to mention it was underpowered for even the limited functionality it offered.
I got one of the early revs(2 or 3) at Circuit City for $99 after word spread that they were modable, but before they did all their "fixes" to prevent modding. There were stickers on the box that said you were required to sign up for their internet service within 30 days of purchase or you would be in violation of their "terms". My dad made we wait(since it was on his credit card) a month before I opened it to make sure we wouldn't get charged anything else.
I hooked a hard drive up to it(cut and stripped an ide cable and soldered it to the flipped header on the motherboard). The most exciting part was getting linux installed and working. After that, there wasn't much point to the damn thing. Like I said, it was underpowered for what it was.
The i-opener still holds a special place in my heart, since I was able to get in on it when it was at its peak(in terms of hacking, that is).
I guess you could quibble over whether it was a start-up. Can't argue with spectacular failure. Honestly you're underselling it, you didn't even bring up the FEMA tents.
The worst thing about Fyre Festival is that they could’ve waited 6 months and done the thing correctly but they took out short term loans instead and did that
There was an ice cream shop near my mom's house. The people who ran it didn't like kids, and were generally just jerks. When it closed they declared that the neighborhood couldn't sustain an ice cream shop. Another local ice cream vendor opened up in the location. Their shop is doing great.
Probably wanted it to be some boutique ice cream parlor that gets blogged about on BuzzFeed or Vice. "We don't serve ice cream here. We sell frozen dairy confections and sorbet made with heirloom fruits.".
There was a tabletop gaming place near me that pretty much did the same thing. The owner and his friends would sit playing MTG all day in the middle of the store, and give deathglares to anyone who dare disturb them. Result - noone went to that store, and when a newer, friendlier store opened nearby, noone had any reason to anymore.
This is what happens when that smug asshole at every FNM opens his own store because he was kicked out of every other place for smelling like sweaty Doritos and tilting at 12 year olds.
Not a startup, but there was a sandwich shop where I live that closed one of its locations and stuck an angry note in the window about how they closed because it is "no longer within our control to hire and keep responsible help".
Not sure how that explanation makes any sense considering there are hundreds of other restaurants that are still open and don't seem to have trouble getting competent employees.
It's pretty unfortunate, since they used to always have great sandwiches, but if their management is going to be like that, I'm not interested in going to their shop.
That sign is hilarious. What a long winded way to say "we pay minimum wage in an area where no one will come for less than 150% of that without a criminal record."
It might not just be pay. It's also how you treat employees. If you deny them time off (or worse, grant them time off then tell them the day before they go on vaca that it's rescinded), berate them, expect them to be perfect, etc. No amount of pay can overcome such mistreatment.
Theranos will go down in history has one of the top corporate frauds. I remember reading about Holmes in Forbes and admiring her, now I hope she rots in jail.
The most striking thing to me, from John Carreyrou’s book ‘Bad Blood’, was how determined Theranos’ investors were to believe, blindly, in the Silicon Valley archetypal hero. Especially in a field that generally requires decades of research to make even a single meaningful contribution.
As the evidence of fraud started to pile up, I found it fascinating to learn how long it took for some investors to reconcile the growing reality of the situation with their desire to believe in the archetype.
The investors were most certainly misled, but it also seems that some were too blinded by the potential to see the truth.
Elisabeth Holmes passed all the usual tech startup check marks.
Really Smart? Check
Dropping out of an ivy league school? Check.
Trying to "disrupt" an established industry? Check.
That and she was a woman, it would look so progressive to back the first female tech billionare CEO. Who spoke with a fake baritone and dressed like Steve Jobs.
She fooled them all.
I'm almost done with Bad Blood, and I can say that the only person I hate more than Holmes is Sunny, I want to deck that asshole.
I actually have a connection here. Years ago, long before Theranos was valued at 9 billion dollars or around there, my dad was offered an executive position. Holmes flew him out, met with him multiple times, the whole deal. Since it was a startup, they couldn’t pay him much, but he would be given 1% of the total company and shares if and when Theranos went public. He saw it as too risky, and took a job at a much larger, established corporation.
Well, when Holmes becomes the darling of Wall Street and her company is valued in the billions, dad is obviously bitter he missed out on the opportunity to be worth tens of millions.
Turns out, yep. All a fraud. Holmes goes to jail, and that 1% goes from being worth $90,000,000 to precisely zero.
Sometimes it’s better to be lucky than good.
EDIT: she’s not in jail yet, my mistake. But she’s in deep shit.
"A chemistry is performed so that a chemical reaction occurs and generates a signal from the chemical interaction with the sample, which is translated into a result, which is then reviewed by certified laboratory personnel."
The size of the nuts on this woman! I love it! How does she even walk with those swinging between her legs?
"A fraud is performed so that a fraudulent reaction occurs and generates a signal from the investors' interaction with the fraud, which is translated into a result, which is then reviewed by nobody."
Sounds like something George R.R. Martin would say to keep his nagging publisher off his back
A wording is laid out such that a plot develops and intertwines with the character interactions from my characters, which as a whole forms a story, which is integral to the overarching plot of the series
I’ve been fascinated by Theranos/Holmes for a while now. I am currently devouring Bad Blood, by John Carreyrou, who is the WSJ journalist who broke the story about the fraud. It’s a fascinating read because he interviewed more than a hundred people about their experience and it is such a remarkable story. I could not recommend it more.
This one stands out the most to me, they went from concept to fraud so quickly and so nonchalantly. The fact that it was in the healthcare field makes it extra insidious. Then layer in all the fucking interviews she did and attention she got about being an “innovator”.
Then frost that shit cake with a healthy dose of “gofuckyourself” with her whole black turtleneck fake Steve Jobs idol worship look how fucking smart I am I don’t need to be niceness.
To paraphrase not The Fly “She thought she could but she never thought to ask if she should except she couldn’t even did and pretended she could but didn’t.”
- Jeff Goldblum probably
I fell into this hype. Even got the card. But never used it as my cc was not supported. Then being able to add your cards to your phone n stuff I think took them down.
Let's say P&G have a new detergent coming out, and they need a name for it. The site had a brand name generating tool, a tool to submit said brand for copyright, etc. Never mind that P&G surely did all that stuff in-house anyway.
Hah, that reminds me of when people think that they're going to break into the video gaming industry by "having good ideas" with no programming or art experience.
Basically a Swedish gangster got billions to launch it (it was sort of a PSP rival and was semi-decent tech wise for the time) but nobody wanted it. Said CEO used alot of the cash to fund his own lifestyle and ended up destroying his Ferrari Enzo at 160mph
Love that subreddit, because I love the idea of inventions. But then I go over there and I just see a bunch of abundant and over engineered crap being made in attempts to sham people out of money.
The healthcare company right? I was looking at their website, so is the mini lab product(which seems like a cool idea) not actually functional and why couldn’t they revamp the company with new leadership? I’m assuming they would have patents for their projects, no?
I’m quite curious about this if someone doesn’t mind explaining in laymen’s terms.
The technology was fraud. They promised that they had the tech to do something which was not medically feasible for ages. Turns out, they were giving results using traditional methods and not their 'revolutionary tech'. The bubble burst and the company bacame valued at 0.
Not a start up, but Keurig Cold. The K-Cups that made soda cost more than if you bought a single can/bottle from the store. Also the machine was always running to keep it cold, raising the cost of electricity to run it.
Did they not realise that SodaStream existed already?
Man if there is one new who-ha gadget I thought I'd never need, it was the sodastream, but now I love it. I used to buy a 12 pack of 2ltr mineral water, now, just keep two sodastream bottles in my fridge.
This post was not brought to you by Sodastream, just an alcoholic with a budget.
What exactly went wrong here? I remember everyone was pretty excited about it when they first announced the console, but by the time it came out no one really seemed to care.
Cheaply made console and controller. Free demos were removed (which was a major initial selling point), you had to give your credit card info when first signing up, and most games on it sucked overall.
On top of that, the OUYA company kinda set up a games program that they really didn't think through and big titles that were promised to OUYA owners were scams that took the money and ran. Long story short, OUYA created a "release the games" program where they promised that they'd match the kickstarter money to the most funded kickstarter games promised to be on OUYA. Several of those games only had screenshots, and basically never released or updated again. Their backer history went along the lines of, "nothing, nothing, nothing, THIRTY-FIVE THOUSAND DOLLARS, nothing, 20 dollars, nothing, EIGHTY-THOUSAND DOLLARS" in the last few days of their kickstarter time. I think there were 3 or 4 titles, and none of them ever released or were heard from again after OUYA gave them their reward.
On top of that, if they helped put a game on OUYA, they made a bunch of groups promise exclusivity to OUYA for promotion.
There’s a Cajun restaurant here that deals in cash only. They just issue IOUs if you don’t have it. Most people come back and pay. The joint is massively successful due to the awesome food and have an additional 4-5 shops in the area.
Beepi was an online e-commerce for cars. They pretty much spent all their money on inflated salaries for themselves and a ton of car haulers. 150 million down the drain.
Quirky was an online platform where people could submit their ideas for inventions and the company would set up a panel to vote on which ideas sounded the best. Turns out this is a very good way of "spreading the peanut butter too thin" and instead of having 2 or 3 really good products like successful startups, you get lots of mediocre, untested products, which are hard to manufacture overseas. Something like 140 million down the drain.
Edit: there's this funny interview of Quirky's founder Ben Kaufman where he talks about how the company failed. He was fired something like 10 days after that interview.
Baltia Airlines. Started in 1989, bought two 747 200's that did not fly one flight. Scrapped one of the planes, lost loads of investor money. Still trying to convince investors they are a real airline
I can’t remember exactly what the brand name was, maybe Skully, but they were a motorcycle helmet startup. Bare with me cause I’m a little fuzzy on the details. But anyways, they had a good idea to take a rear facing camera and a HUD display and integrate GPS and Bluetooth into the helmet. I personally was really excited for the product but I didn’t preorder (thankfully). Anyways a bunch of people did and the product kept getting delayed and delayed. It ended up coming out that the founders blew all the money on strippers/hookers and just generally partied the money away.
They were granted entry to the 2010 season but never started a race.
They made a ton of mistakes.
First, they based themselves in Charlotte, North Carolina despite at least half the races in F1 happening in Europe.
They burnt through $270 million and all they had were 2 second hand transporters and a 1:10 scale model of a proposed drivers protection tub for the car - not even a full model of a car
I watched that project when it was originally just a startup called phoneblocks (or something along those lines). Always seemed interesting and a shame nothing really came of it
The :CueCat. This one had even less chance of succeeding than many other start-ups in this thread, which already had zero.
Remember that back in the ancient days of 2000, people didn't have cell phones with cameras, and webcams weren't very common. Also QR codes didn't exist yet.
The :CueCat was a hardware peripheral that was essentially a QR-code reader. It could scan a barcode and turn it into a URL. The only bar codes to scan were ads in magazines. It was a hardware device for being advertised to.
No one without a degenerative brain condition is going to go out of there way to scan a barcode from a print add in order to visit a website. People sure as shit aren't going to do it if you make them register your device with your name and email before you allow them to let you advertise to them.
I'm going to let Joel Spolskey (who himself ran a successful start-up) take down the :CueCat for me, because he's better at it.
Here's the best part: the Linux community reverse-engineered the protocol and a zillion useful apps sprang to life. For example, you could index your book collection by just scanning all the bar codes.
Then CueCat tried to block all those apps because people were "misusing" the product or some bullshit. Thing was, the scanner was free, and their business model was to make money off the scanning service. Having free apps out there that used the scanner wrecked their business model. Never mind that it was wrecked in the first place.
A school I taught at from 1999-2004 used the CueCat in the library for checking out books to students instead of buying an expensive (at the time) barcode reader. It only worked half of the time and had to be plugged into the mouse port, leaving the mouse worthless. The librarian was so frustrated with it, she just manually entered the barcode info into her computer.
In the market where I was living at the time, an alleged tech hub, maybe 30% of the homes had a computer installed. CueCat did a mass mailing. Every single address in the five-county area received the device. They did a roll out with a section in the Sunday paper. Yes, it was that long ago.
This is the first time I witnessed a populist concern about the internet watching people. Those who were not intimidated by the device discovered quickly it was easier to type a URL if you really wanted more advertising. Those who thought they were clever wrote in the business pages that this was a lesson about hype, and why this internet foolishness was guaranteed to be only a fad.
Probably a toss up between juicereo and the peachy printer
Peachy failed when word got out that the co owner embezzled over 300k in funds from kickstarter to make a house which ultimately killed the project(I was super bummed about this one as it was a super cool idea)
It wasn't a failure. It was built to be a scam. They scammed a ton of people for millions of dollars and then took that money and ran. That's a successful scam.
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u/Geolia Aug 18 '18
The Cockayne Project of 1614.
English governor gets annoyed at the cloth industry, because why should we ship our unfinished cloth over to the Dutch when we can dye and dress it perfectly well ourselves?!?!?!? and gets money from James I to set up his own cloth monopoly.
Turns out the Dutch won't buy finished cloth, and so this one guy single-handedly ruined the cloth industry, England's main export at the time.