How we went from $1M raised and 100k users to shut down

👋 Hey Failories! It's Nico over here.

Last week's article on Y Combinator failed startups completely blew up. It went viral on Hacker News and received tons of shares on social networks. +25k users read it in three days.

Based on all the feedback we received, we've made some modifications. Firstly, we corrected some information which was wrong/not clear. Secondly, we removed the "Other startups" section as we decided we would only focus on the biggest failed startups. Finally, we added two new more failed startups stories (Airware and Homejoy).

Today I have two new interviews: a failed live streaming platform that went from 100k users and $1m raised to 0, and a successful SaaS for repair shops which is making $100k/mo. 

This newsletter is sponsored by Starkflow.

Hope you enjoy this week's content.

As I promised you in last week's email, here're Failory's numbers for September.

Website traffic:

• 58,871 users
• 46,937 of the users (79.73%) came from Google searches
• 71,938 sessions
• 156,949 page views

Email newsletter:

• 293 new email subscribers
• 101 unsubscribes
• 7,358 email subscribers
• 28.14% average open rate
• 2.92% average click rate

Revenue:

• $91.67 from newsletter sponsors
• $879.99 from affiliates (may slightly change)
• $403.00 from the "Product-Market Fit" eBook
• $1,374.66 in total

Expenses:

• $85.01 in PayPal fees
• $35.20 in tools (Webflow and Quuu Promote)
• $109.99 from a VA I've hired
• $31.00 from other expenses
• $261.20 in total

This brings up a profit of $1,113.46, which I'm re-investing into more content, the eBook and other projects I'm working on.

That's all. Let me know if you have any questions. If not, see you next week ;)

- Nico