What are some startup ideas that persistently fail?
Answer (1 of 49): * Anything that makes programming “easy for non-programmers or businesspeople” — * Micropayments — * T-Shirts (except Threadless (and Busted Tees ... thanks Adam Kazwell)) — * Recommendations based on what your friends like
Context & Ripple Effects
This Quora thread gathers practitioner nominations for categories that keep producing failed startups: tools promising to make programming easy for non-programmers, micropayments, t-shirt businesses, and recommendation engines built on what your friends like. With no single announcement behind it, the story is the accumulating consensus itself — a working list of where founders repeatedly lose money.
The t-shirt entry has local grounding in the corpus: TechCrunch's [[1182677|January 2008 update on Startup Schwag]] found a swag-based startup doing well, a reminder that these categories fail often but not uniformly. The answer concedes exactly that, carving out Threadless and Busted Tees — the latter credit owed to Adam Kazwell — as standing exceptions to its own rule.
First-order effects
- Founders pitching in these four named categories inherit a ready-made skeptic's checklist: each nomination doubles as due-diligence shorthand that investors and peers can quote back at them.
- Threadless and Busted Tees are fixed as the reference exceptions, so any apparel pitch now has to argue why it is the outlier rather than the pattern.
Second-order effects
- The exception-framing shifts evaluation inside failing categories from idea merit to structural differentiation, pressuring entrants to name the specific mechanism that lets them beat a category-wide death rate.
- Micropayments' place on the list tells payment builders that per-item billing keeps stalling at consumer scale, pushing the practical conversation toward bundled or subscription-style pricing instead.
Third-order effects
- If category-level failure lists harden into investor convention, the 'dead idea' label starts functioning as a screening heuristic — taxing credible entrants in tagged categories before their specific approach is even examined, and rewarding whoever can argue an exception case convincingly.
The trend: Practitioner communities are converting accumulated startup failure patterns into shared heuristics that pre-screen early-stage ideas by category before a pitch gets heard.