Okay, up front? Most startup advice is recycled nonsense, passed around by people who’ve never actually watched hundreds of companies quietly die. Startup failure isn’t mysterious, it’s patterned. Predictable. Boring, even. The frustration is that founders keep making the same mistakes while congratulating themselves for “learning fast.”
If you’ve been around accelerators, demo days, angel groups, or Slack channels long enough, you start seeing the same corpses in different clothing; different logos, same obituary. What follows aren’t “mistakes.” They’re death patterns. If you see one, you should already be nervous. If you see two, you should stop. If you see three, congratulations, you’re rehearsing a postmortem that we’ve already heard.
So, some patterns, and it struck me that one of these directly contradicts some of the most popular startup pitching advice ever given…
Article Highlights
1. The Solution Looking for a Problem
This one never goes out of style. “I built this really cool AI thing… now I just need to figure out who wants it.” That sentence alone should disqualify you from raising money (who am I kidding, it does disqualify you).
The tell is always the same. You describe the technology before the problem. You light up talking about architecture, models, features, integrations. When someone asks who it’s for, you squint a little and say, “Well, potentially anyone who…” No. Stop. Nobody asked for this.
Research backs this up in painfully obvious ways. CB Insights’ long-running postmortem analysis of failed startups consistently shows “no market need” as the number one reason startups die (aside from a bad team), cited in roughly 35–42% of failures depending on the year. That’s not bad execution. That’s building something no one wanted in the first place.
This pattern thrives because builders confuse capability with demand. Engineers, especially, mistake “can be built” for “should exist.” Markets don’t reward cleverness, they reward relief from pain.
2. The “It’s Like X But for Y” Pitch (Yes, This Is the One That’s Wrong)
This is the sacred cow I’m happy to tip over. You’ve been told by investors, mentors, decks, and Medium posts that the fastest way to explain your startup is to say, “It’s like Uber for dogs,” or “Shopify for healthcare,” or “Slack for construction.” Cute. Familiar. Completely misleading.
When you pitch this way, you’re telling everyone you don’t understand your own business yet.
Analogies compress thinking, they don’t clarify it. When you anchor your identity to another company, you inherit their assumptions, their market context, and their constraints (most of which don’t apply to you). Worse, you train investors to evaluate you as a derivative instead of a solution.
This problem has gotten dramatically worse in the age of AI. “It’s like [X] but with AI!” isn’t a pitch; it’s a confession that your product can be recreated in ten minutes by anyone with access to ChatGPT. If your differentiation disappears when OpenAI ships a new feature, you don’t have a moat, you have a timer.
Harvard Business School research on competitive advantage makes this painfully clear: durable companies are built around unique value creation, not borrowed framing. Substitutability is death.
If your idea only makes sense in comparison to someone else’s success, you’re behind.
3. The Zombie Market
Some markets look alive: they have blogs, conferences, trade associations, and white papers. “Thought leaders.” What they don’t have is a grave marker acknowledging the dozens of startups that already tried (and failed) to make more work.
Zombie markets consume founders. They shuffle forward, moaning about “timing” and “education,” while quietly killing every new entrant. Everyone’s tried. Everyone’s failed. And somehow you think you’re the exception.
Literally, every single Event / Ticket / Things to Do startup I’ve heard about since 2004 is, I know, doomed, because they aren’t even doing what was already successful then… they’re trying to solve a problem in a completely DEAD way.
This is not about competition making it impossible; healthy markets support multiple winners. Zombie markets don’t support any. When you Google your idea and find twenty dead startups with eerily similar positioning, that’s not validation, it’s a warning label.
Economists call this path dependence and market saturation, but founders experience it as slow, confusing resistance. Entrepreneurial recycling happens in healthy ecosystems and how the absence of recycling solutions into new innovations signals structural problems in a market:
If no one survives long enough to become an acquirer, customer, or platform, ask yourself why before you become entry number twenty-one.
4. The One-Time Use Tool
This one hides behind “MVP thinking.” You find a real problem, but it happens once a year; or once per job change; or once per crisis. You build a beautiful product. People say, “That’s useful.” And then they never open it again.
Usage frequency isn’t a metric you want to discover later. It defines your destiny now. Recurring revenue requires recurring pain. If the problem disappears after it’s solved, so does your business.
Low-frequency usage correlates directly with churn, low lifetime value, and failed expansion. Let’s be frank, this is precisely why we have a bit of a challenge in healthcare pushing for preventative care to be prolifically available – it’s not that healthcare community doesn’t want to but there isn’t much money in eliminating problems. Products with infrequent core actions struggle to maintain revenue retention above 100%, which is table stakes.
If your best case is, “They’ll use it again next year,” you don’t have a startup, you have a feature.
5. Customers Said It’s Good
Okay, my article headline lied, I have two bit of conventional wisdom that are b.s. Customers aren’t lying to you, it might be good, but that is NOT market validation and that feedback alone is misleading and irrelevant to your success (because come on, if you don’t know it’s good and you need customers to tell you, you probably aren’t right for that startup, are you??)
Customers don’t want to hurt you. They don’t want to look stupid. They don’t want conflict. So, they nod. They encourage. Heck, they want the solution. They say things like, “I’d totally use that,” which is not the same as actually pulling out a credit card.
Real validation comes from strangers who owe you nothing and still choose to pay. This isn’t opinion; it’s behavioral economics: stated preference is unreliable. Revealed preference (what people actually do) is all that matters. Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman spent his career explaining why humans are terrible at predicting their own behavior, especially in hypothetical scenarios (worth some reading).
If the only people excited about your idea already like you, you don’t have market validation. You have emotional support.
How Startups Avoid Failure in These Traps
The fix isn’t complicated: You have to talk to strangers, not friends (and not just customers). It’s funny the number of times I say this and have some supposed startup advisor tell me I’m wrong. 200 random people is worth FAR more than a dozen potential customers; you’re a startup, not a business that can just close customers. More, you have to look for “hair on fire” problems; situations where people are already hacking together ugly solutions because the pain won’t wait. You have to actively search for failed startups in your space and learn why they died instead of assuming you’re smarter (you’re not). And you have to ask the one question founders dodge because it’s brutal and clarifying: would I pay for this if someone else built it?
Notice what’s missing here: pitching tricks, clever decks, demo day theatrics. None of that matters if you’re standing on one of these fault lines.
Startup failure isn’t random. It’s patterned. Once you see the patterns, you can’t unsee them. The question is whether you’re willing to admit which one you might be standing in right now and whether you’re brave enough to change before momentum turns into rigor mortis.
If you’ve spent enough time around founders, investors, or ecosystems, you’ve seen these deaths play out in different disguises. The interesting work isn’t pretending they don’t exist, it’s recognizing them early, saying it out loud, and helping founders not repeat what everyone else already proved doesn’t work.
