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September 23, 2013 06:54 am GMT

Why Startups Fail: A Postmortem For Flud, The Social Newsreader

flud-handIn late July, news broke that Flud, the social news reader for iOS, Android and Windows Phone, was headed to the deadpool. Startup failure is an all-too familiar, even cliche, story in Silicon Valley. But when San Diegoan co-founders Bobby Ghoshal and Matthew Ausonio officially shuttered the Flud app and website in August, after three years of development, it was a disappointing final chapter for a product that had attracted more buzz in a year than the average startup sees in its entire lifecycle. It was also a surprising conclusion, considering that Flud had managed to raise $2.1 million in seed financing from investors Detroit Venture Partners, Ludlow Ventures, Behance co-founder and CEO Scott Belsky and JFJF Ventures, among others. Furthermore, reports circulated last year that FLUD was continuing to see interest from investors and was in the process of raising up to $8 million in new funding. But Flud never closed on the round and today, the startup is no more. In fact what eventually killed Flud, was that the company wasn’t able to raise this additional funding. Despite multiple approaches and incarnations — including a pivot toward enterprise — in pursuit of the ever elusive product-market fit (and monetization), Flud eventually ran out of money — and a runway. To date, the founders have yet to speak publicly in any detail about Flud’s closure and why the company wasn’t able to turn a promising start into fame and fortune. Last week we caught up with Ghoshal, who graciously agreed to peel back the curtain and offer a bit of a postmortem on Flud– for sake of clarification and, of course, edification. Startups are hard — don’t let anyone tell you differently — and everyone fails. Some just learn to fail better than others, and that’s what makes the difference. Flud’s story has much in common with another recent casualty in the mobile space: Sonar. In a recent post on Medium (which is a must-read for all entrepreneurs, investors and startup peeps), former Sonar co-founder and CEO, Brett Martin, offered insight into why his own mobile, location-based startup went bye-bye. Sonar and Flud were both downloaded by millions of people, were promoted by Apple and Google, raised multiple millions and received high praise from the media — and yet you know how both stories ended. Demand As Paul Graham has famously said, one of the keys to building a

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