Everpix
A cloud photo service that automatically ingested a user's entire photo library and surfaced the good pictures using early computer-vision ranking. It was widely regarded as the best product in its category.
Read the post-mortem53 POST-MORTEM ENTRIES / SEPTEMBER 2026 RESEARCH
The post-mortem files.
A structured record of what went wrong, what founders said, and what the evidence supports. Partial failures, acquisitions, and a category entry are labeled in their records.
Read the full chapter & its limitationsINTERACTIVE / 03 · THE EVIDENCE MAP
Every square
has a backstory.
53 entries. 9 collections. Select a numbered square to preview an entry, then follow its sources. Numbers follow the chapter’s reading order.
This is the composition of a selected research library—not a representative sample, a causal breakdown, or a failure-rate estimate. It includes partial failures and category entries.
Search the complete library53 entries
Wesabe
A personal financial management web app that aggregated bank accounts and used community-contributed data to give spending advice. It launched roughly ten months before Mint.
Read the post-mortemDinnr
A London meal-kit service delivering pre-portioned ingredients plus a recipe for a single dinner, ordered same-day.
Read the post-mortemTutorspree
A marketplace matching students with private tutors — "Airbnb for tutoring" — later restructured as a managed agency that took a larger cut and controlled quality.
Read the post-mortem99dresses
An infinite-closet clothing exchange: users traded unwanted clothes for an internal currency redeemable against other users' items, with the company taking a cut.
Read the post-mortemMuse
A spatial canvas app for iPad and Mac for reading, annotating and thinking — a premium tool aimed at researchers, writers and strategists, sold at $100/year.
Read the post-mortemSandstorm.io (and Sandstorm Oasis)
A personal-server platform that made self-hosting web applications as easy as installing an app, with a novel per-document security sandbox (each app instance ran in its own isolated grain).
Read the post-mortemKite
An AI-powered autocomplete and code-intelligence plugin for Python and later other languages, running partly locally and partly in the cloud — the most prominent pre-Copilot attempt at the category that GitHub Copilot and Cursor would later dominate.
Read the post-mortemApollo for Reddit
A high-quality iOS client for Reddit, sold as a one-off purchase and later a subscription, built by one person.
Read the post-mortemTweetbot (Tapbots)
The best-regarded third-party Twitter client on iOS and Mac, sold as paid software and latterly as a subscription.
Read the post-mortemTwitterrific (The Iconfactory)
The first Twitter client for Mac and one of the first for iPhone; sixteen years of continuous development.
Read the post-mortemHouseFresh
An independent review site that bought and physically tested air purifiers, monetised through affiliate links.
Read the post-mortemDarklang (Dark Inc.)
An integrated language, editor and infrastructure platform intended to remove "accidental complexity" from backend development — you wrote code in a structured editor and it was deployed instantly with no build step or deployment configuration.
Read the post-mortemZirtual
Subscription virtual executive assistants, staffed by full-time American employees rather than contractors — an explicit rejection of the gig model.
Read the post-mortemStandout Jobs
Software helping small and mid-sized employers build recruiting microsites and employer-brand pages.
Read the post-mortemHipmunk
Flight and hotel metasearch with an unusually good interface, sorting results by an "agony" score combining price, duration and stopovers.
Read the post-mortemFast
A one-click checkout button for online merchants, competing with Shop Pay and Bolt.
Read the post-mortemHomejoy
The company blamed four pending worker-misclassification lawsuits, saying they made fundraising impossible. Co-founder Adora Cheung cited "unresolved challenges in the home services space" (Forbes).
Read the post-mortemSprig
On-demand delivery of freshly cooked meals from its own kitchens, promising delivery in under 15 minutes.
Read the post-mortemMunchery
Chef-prepared meals cooked in Munchery's own kitchens and delivered same-day.
Read the post-mortemBeepi
A peer-to-peer used-car marketplace that inspected, photographed, warrantied and delivered cars, holding inventory risk.
Read the post-mortemShyp
An app where you photographed an item, a courier collected it within 20 minutes, and Shyp packed and shipped it for a flat $5 fee plus postage.
Read the post-mortemModsy
3D-rendered interior design: customers photographed a room, Modsy rendered photoreal alternatives with purchasable furniture, and took a retail margin.
Read the post-mortemZeus Living
Master-leased apartments furnished and re-let to corporate travellers and relocating employees on 30-plus-day stays.
Read the post-mortemMindstrong Health
Originally a "digital biomarker" platform claiming that smartphone typing and swipe patterns could predict mental-health deterioration — a "smoke alarm for mental illness" — later pivoted to a virtual mental-health clinic.
Read the post-mortemAirware
Initially drone autopilot hardware and software for enterprises; later pivoted to aerial data analytics for insurance and mining.
Read the post-mortemJawbone
Bluetooth speakers (Jambox) and fitness wearables (UP), sold at premium prices on design quality.
Read the post-mortemKaterra
A vertically integrated construction company: designing buildings, manufacturing components in its own factories, and acting as general contractor.
Read the post-mortemFab.com
A flash-sale site for design objects, pivoted from a failed gay social network, later attempting to become a full-line design retailer with its own manufacturing.
Read the post-mortemHopin
An all-in-one virtual conference and events platform that grew explosively during COVID lockdowns.
Read the post-mortemNorthvolt
Europe's flagship attempt at a domestic lithium-ion cell manufacturer, intended to reduce the continent's dependence on Chinese and Korean suppliers.
Read the post-mortemBird Global
Dockless electric scooter sharing, the fastest company in history to reach a $1B valuation at the time.
Read the post-mortemHumane
The Ai Pin: a screenless, wearable, projector-equipped AI assistant at $699 plus a $24/month subscription, positioned as a post-smartphone device.
Read the post-mortemArtifact
A personalised news app using machine-learning ranking, built by Instagram co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger.
Read the post-mortemGhost Autonomy
Originally consumer-installable highway autonomy for existing cars; later repositioned as multimodal-LLM-based autonomy software sold to automakers.
Read the post-mortemInflection AI
Pi, an empathetic consumer AI assistant, plus the Inflection-1 and Inflection-2.5 foundation models.
Read the post-mortemAdept AI
Foundation models trained to take actions in software — the "agent" thesis, roughly two years before the market was ready for it.
Read the post-mortemForward Health
First a chain of technology-heavy primary care clinics with staff doctors; then CarePods — unstaffed automated diagnostic booths placed in malls and offices, where a patient would self-administer tests guided by AI.
Read the post-mortemNeeva
An ad-free, privacy-preserving subscription search engine, later augmented with LLM-generated answers (NeevaAI, launched January 2023 — before Bing Chat).
Read the post-mortemRelay
An AI-native workflow automation tool — a Zapier competitor built around human-in-the-loop approvals and, latterly, agentic steps.
Read the post-mortemJasper (partial failure — valuation collapse, company survives)
A marketing copywriting tool built on OpenAI's models, with templates and workflows layered on GPT-3.
Read the post-mortemThe GPT-wrapper cohort (a category entry, not a single company)
Interfaces over a third-party model for one task: chat with a PDF, summarise a document, generate marketing copy, write SQL.
Read the post-mortemPear Therapeutics
The first FDA-cleared prescription software treatments — for substance use disorder and insomnia — prescribed by clinicians like drugs.
Read the post-mortemCerebral
Subscription telehealth for anxiety, depression and — critically — ADHD, with prescribing of controlled stimulants under COVID-era telehealth flexibilities.
Read the post-mortemLendUp
Short-term consumer loans marketed as a socially responsible alternative to payday lending, with a "LendUp Ladder" that promised cheaper credit as borrowers repaid.
Read the post-mortemFrank (Charlie Javice)
A tool to simplify the US federal student aid (FAFSA) application.
Read the post-mortemNate
A universal checkout app that claimed to complete purchases on any e-commerce site "with a single tap," using proprietary AI.
Read the post-mortemBuilder.ai
A platform promising that "Natasha," an AI assistant, would assemble custom software applications from reusable components — software development "as easy as ordering pizza."
Read the post-mortemHeadSpin
A platform for testing mobile applications on real devices across global networks. The product was and is real and useful — an important distinction from the other entries in this section.
Read the post-mortemOdeo
A podcast hosting, directory and creation platform.
Read the post-mortemLoopt
Location-sharing among friends on mobile phones, years before smartphones made it practical and before carriers' data pricing made it affordable.
Read the post-mortemDigg
User-voted news aggregation — the original mass-market social ranking site.
Read the post-mortemOne Kings Lane
Flash sales of home furnishings and décor, curated daily.
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