- Company — Dinnr (dinnr.co.uk)
- Sector — Food / meal-kit e-commerce
- Founded / Died — 2012 / 2014
- Lifespan — ~18 months
- Capital raised — Small angel/friends-and-family sum; founder Michal Bohanes described it as a modestly funded London startup and did not publish a headline figure. Treat as undisclosed but small (well under £500k).
- Peak scale — Order volumes in the low hundreds per month at best; the founder's own account is that the business never reached a repeatable rate. No revenue figure published.
- What it built — A London meal-kit service delivering pre-portioned ingredients plus a recipe for a single dinner, ordered same-day.
- Stated cause of death — Bohanes's post-mortem, "Seven lessons I learned from the failure of my first startup, Dinnr," attributes the failure to building before validating: he writes that he assumed a problem existed, built the operation, and only afterwards discovered customers did not want the thing at the price and frequency the model required (Bohanes, Medium).
- Evidenced cause — Agree. One of the cleanest cases of a founder correctly diagnosing his own failure: repeat-purchase rates, the mismatch between same-day perishable delivery and low order density, and acquisition cost against a sub-£20 basket all support it. He also identifies that his "validation" consisted of asking people whether they liked the idea, which is not validation.
- Warning signs visible earlier — Low repeat rate from the first cohorts. Perishable inventory written off weekly. The founder notes he had a full-time job's worth of operational work and no growth channel.
- Money outcome — Small loss, borne by the founder and a few angels. No employees were left materially exposed. Bohanes went on to consulting and writing.
- Post-mortem quality — High and unusually unflattering to its author.
- Transferable lesson — Asking people if they like your idea is the cheapest and least informative research you can do. The only meaningful pre-launch signal is someone paying, or committing something they would rather not lose.
- Sources — Bohanes, Medium · Inc42 reprint · 77 Failed Startup Post-Mortems (archive)
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