- Company — Standout Jobs
- Sector — HR tech / recruiting software
- Founded / Died — 2007 / 2010
- Lifespan — ~3 years
- Capital raised — ~$1.8M seed (Canadian angels and funds)
- Peak scale — Small: dozens of customers, revenue described by the founder as never reaching a meaningful run rate. No published figures.
- What it built — Software helping small and mid-sized employers build recruiting microsites and employer-brand pages.
- Stated cause of death — Co-founder Ben Yoskovitz's post-mortem — one of the earliest widely read founder post-mortems and a direct ancestor of the modern genre — lists his own errors first: the team raised too little money to execute the plan they had, built too much product before validating it, and hired a team structured for a company that did not exist yet. He wrote that the money raised was "not enough to build and market a product properly" and that the correct response would have been to change the plan rather than proceed with it underfunded.
- Evidenced cause — Stated and evidenced causes agree. The small public record corroborates the founder's version: a long build cycle, a late launch, and a market (SMB recruiting software) that required heavy sales effort the company could not fund.
- Warning signs visible earlier — The gap between the funded amount and the planned scope was visible at the moment of the raise, in 2007.
- Money outcome — Investors lost the ~$1.8M. Small team. Yoskovitz went on to co-author Lean Analytics and to a long career in operating and investing roles — see Part 9.
- Post-mortem quality — High, and historically important. Written in 2010, it established several conventions the genre still uses: numbered mistakes, founder-first blame allocation, and a refusal to blame the market. Not self-serving.
- Transferable lesson — Raising some money is not the same as raising enough for the plan you wrote. A half-funded plan is a different, worse plan, and the decision point is at signing, not eighteen months later.
- Sources — 77 Failed Startup Post-Mortems compilation · Platforms and Networks failure index · postmortem.io shutdown index
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