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.
My point is that there seems to be a relationship between scalability and failure. Due to scalable offers facing heavy competition and lacking uniqueness / niche. If you have the only Indian restaurant in the town, the you have checked that a significant % of the population likes curry, how exactly can you fail? Aside from doing obviously dumb things like delivering food cold or oversalted or burnt or unreasonably high prices, as long as it is managed according to basic common sense it cannot really fail. But if you have opened the 537th generic steakhous...
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.