Dan Luu

Really nice startup postmortem that gets into specific reasons the founder thinks the product failed:

https://feelmuddy.notion.site

Most startup/product postmortems I read feel like some variant of "we were just too awesome and the world wasn't ready us", but this feels like a postmortem where the founder is really trying to understand what happened.

Sail & Muddy: A Retrospective

circa: @August 1, 2020 - @August 1, 2024. Learnings and lessons from building multiplayer browsers.

Sail on Notion
Aug 30, 2024 at 12:56amWeb
Show threadAdam CharronAug 30, 2024
@danluu the article seems interesting but the blog site has some atrocious mobile behaviour. They’ve somehow disabled pinch to zoom and there is no way to zoom the photos so I’m stuck just looking at these tiny thumbnails and failing to grasp the idea of the iterations.
Show threadfelix (grayscale) 🐺Sep 3, 2024
@danluu most interesting to me is the conclusion that multiplayer-workspace is fundamentally a non-starter, too many people explicitly do not want that. this seems counter to the success of google docs, github, online games, etc. it's not clear to me what the difference is
Show threadChrisSep 12, 2024

@danluu This is great. I want to read through it a few times to really grasp his points.

But at first glance, I found myself saying: this is a postmortem on ... what? The product idea, pitch, goal wasn't obvious to me.

A postmortem may not need that bit but it does speak to a potential problem, right? Clear and simple articulation of what X is and why you're worse off not using X today. Didn't get it here.