From lack of product-market match to disharmony on the group, we break down the highest 20 causes for startup failure by analyzing 101 startup failure post-mortems.
After we compiled our checklist of startup failure post-mortems, some of the frequent requests we bought was to make use of these posts to determine the primary causes startups failed.
Startups, companies, traders, financial growth people, lecturers, and journalists all wished some perception into the query:
“What are the explanations startups fail?”
So a analysis agency gave these post-mortems the CB Insights’ information remedy to see if we might reply to this query.
After studying by way of each single of the 101 postmortems, we’ve discovered there’s not often one purpose for a single startup’s failure. Nonetheless, we did start to see a sample to those tales.
Since many startups provided a number of causes for his or her failure, you’ll see the chart highlighting the highest 20 causes doesn’t add as much as 100% (it far exceeds it).
Following the chart is an evidence of every purpose and related examples from the postmortems.

There’s definitely no survivorship bias right here. However many very related classes for anybody within the entrepreneurial ecosystem.
It’s price noting that the sort of data-driven evaluation wouldn’t be doable without a lot of founders being brave sufficient to share tales of their startup’s demise with the world. So a giant thanks to them.
People wanted to know: **“Why do startups fail?”** So a research group tried to answer that using real examples.
Here’s what the paragraph is saying, in simple terms:
– A **startup** is a new, young company trying to grow fast.
– When a startup shuts down, founders sometimes write a **“post-mortem”** (like a “what went wrong” report) explaining why it failed.
– The researchers collected **101** of these failure reports and carefully read them.
– They noticed that startups usually don’t fail for just **one** reason. It’s often **a mix** of problems (for example: no customers + ran out of money + team arguments).
– Even though each startup could have multiple reasons, the researchers still looked for patterns and counted the most common reasons.
– They then created a list of the **top 20 most common causes** of startup failure.
Important detail:
– Because one startup can have **several** reasons, when you add up all the percentages in their chart, it can go **over 100%**.
Example: One company might be counted in “ran out of money” *and* “no product-market fit” *and* “team problems.”
Some examples of the kinds of reasons they found:
– **No product–market fit**: They built something, but not enough people wanted it.
– **Team disharmony**: The people running the company fought, didn’t agree, or couldn’t work together.
They also say:
– This isn’t based on only “successful” companies (they’re purposely looking at failed ones), so it’s not pretending everything works out.
– The researchers thank founders who were honest enough to share their failure stories, because without those reports, this kind of analysis wouldn’t be possible.
In short:
They read 101 “we failed because…” stories, found repeating patterns, and listed the 20 most common reasons startups shut down—remembering that most failures have **multiple causes at once**.
In case you are curious to know extra intimately,
Click Below & Download The Detailed Analysis Report
purshoLOGY.com-The Top 20 Reasons Startups Fail.

