Not all startups succeed. This is a general rule of business. Only the strongest survive. However, often, even the coolest projects are doomed to fail just because they are ahead of time. Well, you may not believe it, but I will give you some examples in this post. Sure, there are certain must have success ingredients for every start-up that strives for better financial results. At the same time, there is no universal formula, i.e. you never know which shot will be just the best.

Unfortunately, some techie people and their investors failed simply because people were not ready for those kinds of projects. It’s understood when a startup fails because it does not have any value. But it is such a pity to say bye-bye to sites and projects that are truly worthy. Here’s a brief overview of failed startups that deserved success but turned out a miserable failure.

It is such a pity to talk about SixDegrees.com. This was the first social network that used the principles that all people are just 6 degrees away from each other. People were simply not ready for a social network. A few years later Mark Zuckerberg launched his Facebook and it turned out a huge success. Well, everything in its right time! SixDegrees never became a successful and popular social network, while Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook became an explosion in the WWW.

For your information, AskJeeves used some techniques that are now the cornerstone of Google’s search results algorithm - semantic search and even ranking of pages with their urls. The site managed to survive for about one year. It then declined step by step. Later on. Google introduced their brand new site ranking algorithm and...well, I think you know how successful Google is at the moment. Sad to say, but the world was not prepared for sophisticated site ranking algorithms back then. Bye-bye AskJeeves! We loved you and probably love now.

Ordering grocery online and having food delivered to your home is a normal thing and there are plenty of successful online services in this market. Webvan was among the first, if not the very first. Just try to realize this figure - $1 billion invested in warehouses and all necessary equipment just before launch. It was a miserable success though. At the same time, just a short time later, companies like FreshDirect conquered the market with ease. Isn’t it ridiculous? People were not ready to order food online.

Probably, you cannot imagine your life without Groupon. But you have never heard of letsbuyit.com. No wonder! But this site was the prototype for Groupon. It never grew into a big service because of numerous marketing and audience targeting mistakes.

LoudCloud failed to become a service Amazon Web Services managed to become. Cloud computing is perhaps the most actively developing industry these days. However, LoudCloud was a bit too early in the market. AWS is a huge success today while nobody recalls LoudCloud. Sad but true!