5.8Picnic in the Graveyard
At a Glance
In Brief
Picnic in the graveyard is a generative research method where you study startups and products that previously failed in your market or an adjacent one. You research what they built, interview their former founders and customers when possible, and identify the specific assumptions that proved fatal. The output is a clear picture of what went wrong, what has changed since, and which risks you should test first to avoid repeating the same mistakes.
Common Use Case
You have an idea that has been tried before by other startups that failed. Before repeating their mistakes, you want to study what went wrong, talk to their former customers and founders, and figure out what has changed that might make the idea viable now.
Helps Answer
- What similar products have been tried in the past?
- What did customers like or dislike about those previous products?
- What would the founders of failed similar products do differently if they tried again?
- Which features are essential based on what previous attempts got wrong?
- How is our approach different from what has been tried before?
Description
Sean Murphy described it best: “Do research on what’s been tried and failed. Many near misses have two out of three values in a feature set combination correct (some just have too many features and it’s less a matter of changing features than deleting a few). If you are going to introduce something that’s “been tried before,” be clear in your own mind what’s different about it and why it will make a difference to your customer.”
The goal of this technique is to identify a unique way to angle a product, so that you avoid a previously committed error. You will be introducing the idea at a later time, which will be to your benefit, but it’s likely that previous failures will provide you with useful feedback.
With this technique, you are aiming to construct a fuller picture of what’s been tried in the past to identify potential landmines. This helps navigate a similar space, but with the benefit of the previous founders’ experience. It may help generate ideas on the product side, such as in terms of feature set. It may also help generate ideas about targeting to a different market segment, or any of the ten other pivots in Eric Reis’ The Lean Startup.
AI research tools accelerate the desk-research phase, but the highest-value part of this technique — candid interviews with former founders and former customers — still requires human conversation, since published post-mortems tend to be sanitized.
How to
Prep
- Scope the graveyard. Define the product space or adjacent market you are studying — narrow enough that the failures you find are comparable to your idea, broad enough that more than two or three dead products show up.
- Identify failure databases and post-mortem sources. CB Insights, Failory, and the Wayback Machine are good starting points for written post-mortems; press archives and old crowdfunding pages help fill in companies that died quietly.
- Set a timebox for outreach. Decide up front how long you will spend tracking down each former founder or ex-customer. One day per founder is reasonable when there are only a handful of comparable startups; tighten the box if the list is long.
- Draft your research questions. Write the questions you will ask former customers (what they used the product for, what they liked, what they switched to) and the separate set you will ask former founders (what assumption proved wrong, what they would do differently, what has changed in the market since).
Execution
- Perform some desk research (such as Google) to identify previous attempts at entering a similar market with a similar product to your product/product idea. Depending on the idea type, you may also find it useful to ask your local librarian if they can help you find relevant case studies.
- Use social media platforms to seek out customers of these previous companies. Look for “Likes” of the product/company name on Facebook, or old tweets mentioning the company.
- Reach out and contact these previous customers and interview them. Do both problem and solution interviews. Find out what they liked and disliked about the previous company.
- Then try to find the founders or project/product leads (if at a big company) and interview them about their experiences.
Analysis
This is a wonderful technique to generate a lot of ideas in an area you are already operating in. Particularly at the beginning of a startup journey, this technique can help zoom in on what to avoid and exactly what to test, to verify for yourself if a particular assumption is still true/false.
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Overconfidence “We’re different, so what they did doesn’t apply.” This is what stops most founders from running this exercise at all. Treat past failures as evidence to disprove, not noise to ignore.
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Survivorship bias Studying only the failures (or only the survivors) gives a skewed picture. Look at both, and at near-misses that pivoted, to see the full shape of the space.
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Dismissing the idea too quickly Exploring why others failed can make you doubt your own idea too much if you can’t immediately find a unique angle. Use the findings to design tests, not to abandon the idea prematurely.
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Picnic in the Graveyard If you try to hold a night-time picnic in a cemetery that doesn’t allow it you might get arrested. - @RebelCircus
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Our idea is not unique. Use the Picnic in the Graveyard technique. - @TriKro
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Get help from other founders when you can. Use the Picnic in the Graveyard technique. - @TriKro
Learn more
Case Studies
Critica: First-time founder post-mortem
Jason Huertas reflects on building Critica for 18 months without validating demand and treating a v0 as if it were a mature product — first-time-founder lessons distilled into a single retrospective.
Failory: Curated startup-failure archive
A weekly newsletter and “Graveyard” archive that curates startup failure stories so founders can study what went wrong.
CB Insights: 483 startup failure post-mortems
An ongoing post-mortem compilation organized by quarter and root cause, featuring failures like Olive ($850M raised), Convoy ($836M raised), and Hyperloop One ($472M raised).
Quibi: $1.75B burned in six months
Quibi shut down six months after launch, never having validated the core assumption that consumers wanted premium short-form mobile video; the post-mortem identifies mobile-only launch during COVID lockdowns and $5–$8/month pricing against free TikTok and Instagram as fatal positioning errors.
Google Glass: $1,500 AR glasses to enterprise pivot
The Glass Explorer program priced consumer units at $1,500, drew a privacy backlash that earned wearers the “glasshole” label, and was eventually pivoted to manufacturing, logistics, and healthcare — sound technology, wrong original market.
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