We strip the name off a famous flop’s pitch and feed it to Kasspian cold, before anyone knows how it ends. 22 of them, averaging 2.7/10. Not one it would have told you to build.
We ran five ideas, weak to strong, through our own validator to check it isn’t just always saying no. The scores landed 1/10 to 7/10. See the spread.
A company raised $120 million to sell a juicer you didn't need.
Fatal flawThat customers will stay subscribed to the produce packs long enough (six to twelve months) for the business to recover the cost of the machine it gave them.
Rabbit sold a hundred thousand people a $199 AI box to run their apps, then most of them stopped using it within weeks.
Fatal flawThat a small standalone gadget can reliably drive the apps and services on your phone better than your phone can, and that enough people will carry and pay for a second device to do, less reliably, what the one already in their pocket does for free.
Amazon built a phone around a feature nobody asked for.
See what killed itHumane built a $699 device to replace the smartphone before it proved anyone wanted to put their phone down.
Fatal flawThat a meaningful number of people want a standalone, screenless AI device to replace the phone they already own and love, and will pay around $700 plus a subscription for a slower, less capable version of things their phone already does instantly.
Webvan built warehouses for a hundred cities before proving it could win one.
Fatal flawThat razor-thin grocery margins and costly home delivery can support hundreds of millions in custom warehouse infrastructure, built nationwide up front, before a single city has shown the orders and the economics actually work.
The AI doing your shopping was hundreds of people in a Manila call center, clicking buy by hand.
Fatal flawThat a single AI agent could reliably complete checkout on any merchant on the internet (thousands of unique, constantly changing, anti-bot-defended flows) with no integrations and no human stepping in, and that this was already solved at 90-plus percent.
Pets.com went from IPO to liquidation in 268 days.
Fatal flawThat you can sell heavy, low-margin commodity goods below cost, subsidise the shipping, and still reach profitability before the cash spent acquiring each customer runs out.
They called it a stablecoin. It was a confidence game with a yield bolted on.
Fatal flawThat a $1 peg can be held by arbitrage against a volatile sister token, and that a fixed 19.5% yield paid out of a finite reserve is a growth engine rather than a countdown timer.
They backed billions in customer money with a coin they printed themselves.
Fatal flawThat a token the company prints itself can be counted as real collateral backing real customer deposits.
Google built a face computer before anyone agreed it was okay to wear one.
See what killed itJawbone raised $900 million and still lost the wristband.
Fatal flawThat a hardware startup can hold a defensible position in a category that giants with cheaper supply chains, app platforms, and phones already in everyone's pocket will commoditise.
Every one of these looked like a sure thing too. Get the honest call on yours, before it ends up here.
Score my idea