Every startup mistake has already been made.
Learn before you build.
A curated knowledge base of 3,700+ authentic postmortems, bootstrapping chronicles, first-dollar launches, and architectural battles. Real numbers and raw retrospectives from builders.
Indispensable Masterclasses
Tenured founders and engineers reflect on their defining highs and devastating lows.
“Paras Chopra on bootstrapping Wingify for 15 years to tens of millions in ARR without a dime of venture capital.”
12 Startup Life Sagas
Follow iconic products across their entire lifecycle—from the euphoric launch to scaling battles, acquisitions, or postmortems.
RethinkDB
The open-source distributed JSON database that developers loved, but businesses wouldn't buy.
Pebble
The Kickstarter smartwatch pioneer that challenged giants, got acquired, and rose from the dead.
Heroku
The cloud king that invented modern developer experience, lost its soul, and taught a generation of self-hosters.
Trello
From Fog Creek internal side experiment to 10M users, viral Kanban adoption, and a $425M acquisition.
DuckDuckGo
The bootstrapped privacy search engine that took on Google from a suburban basement and built a $100M+ business.
Indie Hackers
The transparent community that sparked the global Build-in-Public revolution and got acquired by Stripe.
Parse
The backend-as-a-service acquired by Facebook for $85M, suddenly shut down, and revived by open source.
Dark Sky
The hyperlocal weather forecasting API indie devs relied on, until Apple bought and closed it.
The Knowledge Vault
Filter by business stage, technical stack, or macro era. All views can be bookmarked or shared via URL.
“Paras Chopra on bootstrapping Wingify for 15 years to tens of millions in ARR without a dime of venture capital.”
“Zoom acquires Keybase to accelerate end-to-end cryptographic security following global pandemic video conferencing scrutiny.”
“Software engineer Michael Lynch reflects on walking away from a lucrative Big Tech salary to seek autonomy as an independent builder.”
“Ask HN: What's your quarantine side project? Over 2,200 founders and developers share what they built while stuck at home.”
“Kozmos founder details the devastating impact of platform risk when Google Chrome extension store policies killed their business.”
“Reddit engineers reveal the WebSocket and Redis caching architecture that withstood millions of concurrent pixel placements on r/Place.”
“How unit economics, customer churn, and worker misclassification lawsuits unravelled Homejoy despite $40M in VC funding.”
“A deeply vulnerable account of the psychological toll, identity crisis, and emotional wreckage when your venture-backed startup folds.”
“Courtland Allen shares how building in public and interviewing founders grew Indie Hackers into an indispensable community acquired by Stripe.”
“RethinkDB's founder Slava Akhmechet shares why developer adoration does not equal market viability: solve a burning business problem before perfecting architecture.”
“Apple acquires Dark Sky, leading to the eventual shutdown of Android versions and the third-party developer API.”