TIL the founders of a failed delivery app spent $14,000 on a launch party and $0 on testing the app
I was digging through old Reddit threads about dead startups last week and found a post from a guy who worked at a grocery delivery app in Portland that died in 2019. He said the two founders blew $14,000 on a launch party with a rented venue and an open bar, but the app crashed every time someone tried to add more than three items to a cart. The crazy part is they knew about the bug two weeks before launch and decided to ship anyway because the party was already booked. What bugs me is how often this same story shows up in dead startup post-mortems: big money on flash, zero on the boring stuff that actually keeps users around. I keep seeing people blame the market or the timing when the real cause was they never tested the basics. The guy said their total budget was around $300,000 and they never once did a full test run with real shoppers. Has anyone else found a post-mortem where the cause of death was this dumb and simple?