[teadrinker]

I'd argue the main reason it failed was it was a bad idea. Their was no market for your product no matter how well you made it.

Try not to take away execution lessons when the idea was poor. The execution was fine and if you'd have used a good idea you'd be doing reasonably well now.

As an aside, does anyone have links to other startup postmortems?

[timruffles]

Could be right there :) Inference from either failure or success is tricky.

That said, I think "not knowing my customer" is still a sound lesson. If you know your customer, you'll know whether there is or isn't a market.

Re post-mortems, should keep you going:

http://www.chubbybrain.com/blog/startup-failure-post-mortem/

http://www.businessinsider.com/the-25-best-startup-fail-stor...

[asanwal]

Another related one which analyzes 32 post-mortems and identifies the 20 recurring reasons for failure

http://www.chubbybrain.com/blog/top-reasons-startups-fail-an...