One Reason Startups Fail

Come on, people! At least try to make your apps more than punch lines for blogs like mine. Just days after posting about the shakeout among mediocre consumer technology companies, I see a review of three apps designed to help you split the bill with friends/roommates: Billr, SplitWise and OpnTab. As regular readers know, I think that any company with a name like Billr is destined to fail. When it’s an app that does nothing you can’t do with a calculator (which is built into your phone), then its chances of success are even lower. In addition, despite the savage failure of Blippy, the app that shared with your social graph the details of all your purchases, here we have the launch of Mine, which shares with your social graph the details of all your purchases. Venture-backed technology is at its best when it solves big problems. Three apps that help you divide by seven are not solving problems at all.