What is startups.rip, and why is it a valuable resource for businesses?

There are plenty of tales of woe out there of the startups that shone then fizzled out; but a coder has now used AI to create a database of thousands of them. 

Where startups.rip differs from the annual roundups of which startups have floundered is that each venture has a detailed profile explaining why the startup failed. 

As creator Oscar Hong writes, “startups die”, but “ideas don’t” – and that’s what makes this such a goldmine of knowledge. For small businesses keen to learn from the mistakes of businesses in their sector have made before to entrepreneurs looking for inspiration for a new venture, it’s a unique and valuable resource well worth delving into.

What is startups.rip?

Oscar Hong introduced startups.rip this week, mentioning in a Reddit post that the idea came from analysing some of the biggest names in startup failures and noticing an interesting pattern. 

“Sam Altman’s first startup, Loopt, was a location-sharing app that shut down in 2012. Five years later, Snap Maps launched the same idea to 300M+ users” Hong wrote on the 

He then points to Posterous, which floundered but was followed by Substack years later, built around the same core idea but hugely successful. Parse and Supabase are a similar pairing, he says, and the latter raised at $5B valuation.

“We kept finding this pattern — startups that failed not because the idea was bad, but because the timing, market, or tech wasn’t ready yet,” he adds.

So, he set about building startups.RIP as a directory using AI, including the Claude Agent SDK as the Deep Research agent. Despite only being put live recently, it’s already causing quite the stir on both LinkedIn and X.

Why is it useful?

What the directory isn’t is just a list of all of the things not to do when starting a venture. Instead, each profile is highly detailed. 

To pick one example, we can look at the information on the Australian peer-to-peer fashion marketplace, 99dresses, which caused a stir in 2010 as a disruptor in the fashion industry. It also attracted headlines as the founder, Nikki Durkin, was just 18 years old at the point of launch. There has been plenty of analysis as to why the business failed, including posts by Durkin herself. The idea was always good; it was the execution that saw it falter. 

The company’s startup.rip profile includes a timeline of the venture, its market position, and a detailed “post mortem.” It delves into everything from the issues Durkin faced trying to get a US visa to expand there to the 18-month execution gap between its “peak external validation” and the production of a functional mobile product. Some of the analysis has come from Durkin herself, so this adds weight to its worth. 

However, alongside the “lessons to be learnt”, the profile also features a “build plan” for a 2026 reimagining of 99 dresses. This includes analysis of the current markets, what the core features of the offering should be and a contemporary “go-to market” strategy. 

There is also an option to buy a “complete implementation blueprint” for $5, though there doesn’t seem to be any feedback from founders as yet on this. A chance to ask an AI agent is also teased at the bottom of the page, but currently says startups.rip needs to provision more API tokens for it to work. 

Who can learn from startups.rip?

Founders can search the directory for different sectors, so perusing similar companies to your own could prove to be a useful thing to do during the initial stages of founding a venture.

But it has a wider appeal for people who are still firmly in the ideas stage. In fact, Hong suggests that the directory could always be a way of leapfrogging forward. 

“For many startup ideas, another founder already validated there was demand, they just couldn’t execute, ran out of money, or were too early to the market,” the creator says on Reddit. “If you’re looking for what to build, start with what already almost worked.”