Why We Shut Down
In this postmortem from 2024, @yorwba candidly breaks down the dissolution of their startup, examining the fatal assumptions, misallocated resources, and market dynamics that led to its shutdown.
Core Principles for Independent Builders:
Early signals were often rationalized away instead of prompting an immediate pivot in distribution or pricing.
The psychological toll of running out of capital compounds operational friction in a solo or small team setup.
Key Antidote: Validate paying willingness before committing months to building sophisticated product features.
Community Debate Themes:
Community discussions on HN centered on identifying product-market fit early, avoiding vanity metrics, and the emotional recovery process after shutting down.
CATEGORY Postmortems & Failures →
HISTORICAL ERA Post-ZIRP & AI (2023–2026)
COMMUNITY SCORE 31 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 11 comments
The problem is "top down" or "trickle down" interventions/actions/programs. People who are not in the same situation decide what is good and beneficial for others. It is arrogant and ineffective.
We are now so accustomed to a model that says "people don't know what is good for them" that we accept it without question. Just ask yourself if you would like for someone to come from another culture and tell you what you want and need? Not to mention that there are values in those offers that may not be your own.
I am not advocating that we walk up to a person and giving them something they want. I am advocating for an effective process that allows a community of people to say what is good for them.
I just wrote a blog post relating my personal experience trying to do good in Africa to “Why We Shut Down”. I make a somewhat bold claim, that even though the authors were admirably self-critical they still missed their biggest mistake.
All feedback welcome. I’m still on the ground in Africa and able to action on advice
https://open.substack.com/pub/bigdumbadventure/p/five-widows?r=4fetx&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true ↗
I would expand that to all things. The problem is there are way more people that want to get monkeys off their back more than they want to actually do good.
This is the same problem that causes things like crowdstrike (sorry for bringing that into this). People want to say they are doing good because saying it gives them most of what they want from actually doing good at 1 one thousandth the cost.
And for the most part interventions in Africa have caused cascading problems that ultimately lead to more human suffering. A complete failure to understand what and who Africa is.
Even Albert Schweitzer by the end had lost hope that it could survive at all without constant intervention.
To summarize, they didn't carefully read the research they based their organization around, and once they did they realized it more or less wouldn't work. It takes a lot of guts to admit that kind of mistake - glad they shared it.