Top 10 Most Failed Startup Ideas

Spent $147 million in venture capital and blew $1.2 million on a Super Bowl ad selling heavy, low-margin pet food online before anyone had broadband, lasting only 268 days after IPO.

An app that only let you send the word "Yo" to friends raised $1.5 million at a $10 million valuation in 2014, perfectly encapsulating the anything-goes absurdity of the mobile app gold rush.

Two ex-Google employees tried to replace beloved neighborhood bodegas with AI-powered vending machines, sparking immediate backlash for gentrification and cultural erasure before pivoting and rebranding.

Raised $41 million before launch for a social photo-sharing app in 2011 that nobody understood or used, burning through the funding in 18 months and selling its patents to Apple for pennies on the dollar.

Lucas Duplan raised $30 million at age 22 from Richard Branson and Peter Thiel for a mobile payments app that never properly launched, plagued by internal chaos, firings, and a product that kept changing.

Charged $14.99 per month to mail you $10 worth of quarters for laundry machines, a business model so absurd it was initially mistaken for satire but was completely genuine.

Raised $40 million to be the Uber of house cleaning but offered $19 cleanings that cost $50 to fulfill, while worker misclassification lawsuits piled up and customers had no loyalty to the platform.

Raised $5.5 million to provide affordable virtual assistants but the unit economics never worked, shutting down literally overnight in 2015 with employees finding out via a 2 AM email that the company was gone.

Raised $35 million at a $100 million valuation for an anonymous sharing app that became a platform for workplace bullying and rumor-spreading, shutting down 16 months after launch when the founder returned money to investors.

Spent $147 million in venture capital and blew $1.2 million on a Super Bowl ad selling heavy, low-margin pet food online before anyone had broadband, lasting only 268 days after IPO.

An app that only let you send the word "Yo" to friends raised $1.5 million at a $10 million valuation in 2014, perfectly encapsulating the anything-goes absurdity of the mobile app gold rush.

Two ex-Google employees tried to replace beloved neighborhood bodegas with AI-powered vending machines, sparking immediate backlash for gentrification and cultural erasure before pivoting and rebranding.

Raised $41 million before launch for a social photo-sharing app in 2011 that nobody understood or used, burning through the funding in 18 months and selling its patents to Apple for pennies on the dollar.

Lucas Duplan raised $30 million at age 22 from Richard Branson and Peter Thiel for a mobile payments app that never properly launched, plagued by internal chaos, firings, and a product that kept changing.

Charged $14.99 per month to mail you $10 worth of quarters for laundry machines, a business model so absurd it was initially mistaken for satire but was completely genuine.

Raised $40 million to be the Uber of house cleaning but offered $19 cleanings that cost $50 to fulfill, while worker misclassification lawsuits piled up and customers had no loyalty to the platform.

Raised $5.5 million to provide affordable virtual assistants but the unit economics never worked, shutting down literally overnight in 2015 with employees finding out via a 2 AM email that the company was gone.

Raised $35 million at a $100 million valuation for an anonymous sharing app that became a platform for workplace bullying and rumor-spreading, shutting down 16 months after launch when the founder returned money to investors.