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No Customers, Bad Model: Startup Failures

Wisdom
Notes
Data
Advice
·
Published on Jun 18, 2026
no-customers-bad-model-startup-failures-b4d9d874.png

This Notion table is a graveyard of startup attempts: 26 projects across 13 years, most with $0 revenue and a fat red “Failed” tag. When you zoom in, a pattern screams at you: “No Customers”, “Bad Biz Model”, “Not Scalable”, “Nobody Cared”. The few wins got bought or hit product‑market fit. Everything else was just practice runs in the wrong direction.

Use This Like A Checklist, Not A Horror Story

Before you build, run through these rows in your head: Do I know exactly who the customers are? Have they paid for this outcome before? How will this make money on day one? If you can’t answer those, you’re about to add another $0 red row to your own spreadsheet. Steal the main lesson from this image: ideas don’t fail in the market, they fail in the Notion table when you skip customers and skip the model.

What This Failure Spreadsheet Really Shows

  • Most projects died before real sales: rows are stacked with $0 next to 100–800 hours of work.
  • The same death notes repeat: “No Customers”, “Bad Biz Model”, “Hard To Monetize”, “Nobody Cared”.
  • Time spent doesn’t equal traction: a 10,000‑hour project sold, but plenty of 150–800‑hour ones flatlined.
  • Winners are obvious in hindsight: they show real revenue, then “Sold it” or “Product Market Fit”.
  • The best lesson isn’t the successes; it’s how brutally fast to kill anything with no customers and no model.

Startup Post‑Mortems From The Table

iFix SB logo

iFix SB started in 2012, made about $45K, then got tagged “Sold it | Not Scalable,” proving profit without scale can still be a dead end.

Pigeon CRM logo

Pigeon CRM in 2019 shows $29K revenue and a “Sold it | YC Reject | Undifferentiated” label, meaning money came in but the model didn’t excite investors.

YouTube Channel (second try) logo

The 2023 YouTube Channel logs roughly –$500K, 2,000 hours, and a “Sold | Product Market Fit” status, proving one strong model can pay for a decade of flops.

Creative Variations

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