If you can make a profit opening a small restaurant, then a large startup (this is the word for a scalable business) will try to do that in a way that scales (franchising).
I don't see that here. Franchising is largely an American habit, probably due to many restaurants, even real ones (steakhouses) having semi-fast-food type approaches that lend themselves easily to being broken down to procedures and rules that can be trained to anyone. Most restaurants I see here don't have these semi-industrial procedures, they are typically based on the personal touch, the owner cooking or training a cook in person, by mentoring, without being able to break that down into written rules that can be trained by someone else in a different city. The interior design and even the building itself plays a non-scalable role as well i.e. if you open a fish restaurant with a fisherman's theme and put 100 years old fishing instruments on the wall, you cannot really blow up into a chain of 50 restaurants, in that case the decoration will be made in some kind of a factory and the whole thing having a fake vibe. In short, their appeal is largely in their uniqueness, being in a specific historical building, having a specific semi-historical or not but generally unique interior, with the personal touch of the owner's cooking or personally trained cook and all that.
I figure the kind of restaurant that could be potentially turned into a franchise could easily fail because it would not have this appeal of uniqueness. It would be just a place to eat at... not the whole experience of time-travel or travel to a distant place in the case of authentic ethnic ones.
Point, and yet , over 60% of restaurants fail in the first 3 years. In terms of small businesses over all, 90% fail in the first five years. It's true that the percentage of businesses that become unicorns is much, much smaller than 10%; either way, I think calling any business easy, whether startup or small business, is drastically overstating the odds of success.
Entrepreneurial ideas come and go. Some I don't give a second thought to. Others I commence market research for, examine the competitive landscape and explore the feasibility for development. This can be time consuming, and has yet to have produced any tangible, commercialized product.
I figure it's about time I devote the time I would spend to exploiting my existing repertoire of knowledge to develop an idea, to exploring parsimonious, efficient techniques for assessing viability.
In my search I found [Autopsy.io], a startup graveyard. Founders describe why their startups failed, concisely. It made me think about my past startup ideas and why they haven't flied.
I'm going to work that out, put it in a spreadsheet and regress to whatever problem keeps popping up - then, I'll work on improving my subject matter knowledge in that domain - for example, if its the feasibility of implementing with existing technology - I might learn more about the current technological landscape in general. Or, more about existing services for investors, if my product is a service for investors, like my last startup idea, which I have autopsied in detail here
I just thought I'd share my general strategy for anyone who'd want to copy this procedure for startup autopsy. Please use this space to suggest other appropriate diagnostic methods.