5.9 Picnic in the Graveyard
At a Glance
Other names Failed Product Postmortem
In Brief
Picnic in the graveyard is the study of startups and products that already failed in your market or an adjacent one. You research what they built, interview their former founders and customers when you can reach them, 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 to test first so you 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
Picnic in the Graveyard is the study of products and companies that already tried — and failed at — something close to what you are building. It pairs desk research on what they built and why they died with candid interviews of the people who were there: former founders and former customers. The goal is to build a fuller picture of what has been attempted in your space so you can spot the landmines before you step on them. Many failed products got most of a feature set right and missed on one thing; some simply shipped too many features. If you are about to introduce something that has been tried before, you want to be clear about what is different this time and why that difference will matter to a buyer.
Studying the graveyard often generates ideas as well as warnings. The lessons may point at the product itself — which features were essential and which were noise — or at the market, suggesting a different segment to target or a change in direction.
The desk-research phase is fast, but the highest-value part of the method is the candid interview with a former founder or former customer. A former founder is essentially a domain expert on the exact failure you are trying to avoid, so treat that conversation like an Ask an Expert session. Published post-mortems tend to be sanitized, so the honest account of what really went wrong usually comes out only in conversation.
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. Curated failure archives, post-mortem compilations, and web archives 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 former 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
- Build the list of dead products. Run desk research to identify previous attempts at a similar product in your market or an adjacent one. AI search and the failure databases from Prep do most of this work; for niche or older spaces, press archives and a reference librarian can surface attempts that never made it online.
- Find former customers. Use public signals to locate people who used the dead products: old posts mentioning the product by name, profiles listing the company as an employer, app-store reviews, and archived community-forum threads.
- Interview the former customers. Reach out and run the interviews using the questions drafted in Prep, covering what they used the product for and what they liked and disliked. Stay neutral and let them talk.
- Interview the former founders or product leads. Track down the people who built each product — founders for startups, the project or product lead at a larger company — and interview them about what they assumed, what proved wrong, and what they would change.
Analysis
- Cluster failures by root cause. Group the post-mortems and interview notes by what actually killed each product — wrong buyer, no willingness to pay, weak distribution, bad timing. The clusters show where the space is most dangerous.
- Find the repeated assumptions. Note the assumptions that show up in two or more failures. A mistake several teams made independently is a pattern, not a coincidence, and should be treated as default-risky for your own idea.
- Check what has changed since. For each fatal assumption, ask whether the market, technology, or buyer behavior has shifted enough that it might no longer hold. A failure caused by conditions that no longer exist is an opening, not a warning.
- Turn each pattern into a test. For every assumption you cannot rule out, design a cheap, falsifiable experiment that checks whether it is still true today. These tests become your validation priorities.
- Overconfidence “We’re different, so what they did doesn’t apply” is the reflex that keeps founders from studying past failures at all. Treat those failures as evidence to disprove, not noise to ignore.
- 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.
- Premature abandonment bias Exposure to a graveyard of failures can tip founders into discarding a viable idea before testing it. If the evidence shows others failed, weight that as a signal to design falsifiable experiments — not as a verdict on whether your version can succeed.
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 — the kind of candid founder retrospective a graveyard study mines for the assumption that actually proved fatal.
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 a mobile-only launch during COVID lockdowns and $5–$8/month pricing against free TikTok and Instagram as fatal positioning errors. A worked example of the failure-assumption mapping this method produces.
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. The kind of “right idea, wrong segment” pattern a graveyard study is built to surface.
Further reading
- Kromatic: Generative Research — The Picnic in the Graveyard Technique
- SKMurphy: Pretotyping – Techniques for Building the Right Product
- Phillip Kaplan: F’D Companies: Spectacular Dotcom flameouts
- Eric Ries — The Lean Startup (Crown Business, 2011)
- CB Insights — The Top 12 Reasons Startups Fail
- Failory — Startup Graveyard
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