After Analyzing over 8k Companies Worldwide, We Learn that Startup Failure is a Feature, Not a Bug

According to Flipidea’s recent study on 8,377 inactive companies worldwide, 89.2% of companies did not survive up to 10 years, which strong competition was cited as the number 1 reason for shutdown.

“Companies often fail because founders and investors neglect to look before they leap,” says Flipidea Co-founder and CEO Paul Lee. “Not every great idea is business worthy because business is simply what your target market is willing to buy what you’re selling them.”

When founders want to build a business with strong competitive edge but do not have the right knowledge and affordable tools, Flipidea aims to help founders analyze and validate the market at minimal cost, so founders can make data-informed decisions to improve and innovate their business.

“At its core, business is more science than art because its many structural components and processes are methodical, measurable, experimental, and repeatable,” says Lee. “Founders, even investors, should identify avoidable patterns from past experiences to avoid hindsight bias. Similar to how experiments are tested for desired outcomes.”

Failure is the process of advancement, especially in the quest for innovation, in the fields of entrepreneurship, engineering, and science.

“So it helps to embrace failure as information or data for innovative problem-solving because it is the very essence of empirical learning,” says Lee. “We can unpack failure like an experiment and learn from it through the scientific method - formulating a hypothesis, testing it, measuring it, learning from it, and reiterating it.”

This explains why Flipidea’s solutions such as postmortem analysis, competitive analysis, portfolio analysis, co-investors analysis, and idea validation are powered by its extensive database of business failures, historical, and market data to foster innovation.