'No market need' is an explanation you apply afterwards. I looked for something visible on day one.

No market need is an explanation you apply after a company has already failed. It is useless on the day you have to decide, because it does not name anything you could have seen beforehand.

So I took 5 companies whose stories are finished, wrote each as the one-liner it could have been described by at founding, and looked for a property visible on day one. 3 of the 5 share one.

The money went out before the answer came in. Studio-produced episodes had to be commissioned before anyone could find out whether people wanted premium short video on a phone. A countertop press and its proprietary packs had to be manufactured before anyone discovered the packs squeezed fine by hand. Automated warehouses and a delivery fleet had to exist before the grocery demand at that price was known.

That is a different failure from no market need. Plenty of businesses discover there is no market need and stop, having spent a landing page and three weeks. What killed these was the ordering: the test could not run until after the money was gone.

The fourth has the opposite shape — a capability in search of a complaint. Nobody had written down the problem always-on camera glasses solved, and the objection they eventually met was not about market size at all.

Now the part I think matters more than the pattern. Our own gate killed 4 of the 5, which is a fact about verdicts and is published with every row. What I will NOT claim is that the reason it gave for each kill was the reason the company actually died. An adversarial audit of our own output found the cited reason is sometimes adjacent to the real one. Catch is a claim I can support; diagnosis is not.

Which also means the honest use of this is not the checklist would have saved these companies. It is narrower: before you commit money that a test could have spent instead, notice whether your answer can arrive first.

And the row nobody killed stays in the table. A set of cases with the failures removed is a testimonial.

All five, with sources: https://whittleos.com/guides/famous-startup-failures-analysis