Picnic in the Graveyard

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.

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 AI Prompt

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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).

Analysis AI Prompt

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.