Boo.com: so many lessons from this failure

By Andrea Dusi in Famous Startups 0 Comment
Boo.com Logo

“Unless we raise $20 million by midnight, boo.com is dead“

So said boo.com CEO Ernst Malmsten, on May 18th 2000. Half the investment was raised, but this was too little, too late, and at midnight, less than a year after its launch, Boo.com closed. The headlines in the Financial Times, the next day read: “Boo.com collapses as Investors refuse funds; Online Sports retailer becomes Europe’s first big Internet casualty”.

The boo.com case remains a valuable case study for all types of businesses, since it doesn’t only illustrate the challenges of managing E-commerce for a clothes retailer, but rather highlights failings in E-commerce strategy and management that can be made in any type or organization.

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Blockbuster, Netflix and DVD rental: who better reinvents themselves survives

By Andrea Dusi in Famous Startups 0 Comment
Blockbuster

60 million members, points of sale in 25 countries, with 4,800 stores in the U.S. alone. The figures are exorbitant, gob smacking, yet even these incredible figures didn’t save Blockbuster from bankruptcy.  Because, if you are not capable of evolving and keeping up with the times, even if a giant you can fall.

But first things first, let’s go back to 1985 when in Dallas, Texas, Blockbuster opened its first store.

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Turntable, when Plan B is better than Plan A

By Andrea Dusi in Famous Startups 0 Comment
Turntable

September 10th, 2013, from the Turntable blog: We love interacting and DJing with our community. Turntable is incredibly important to us (…). We aren’t trying to kill it, you are watching us fight for it.

November 22nd, 2013, from the Turntable blog: As much as we all love turntable.fm, we have decided to shut it down to fully concentrate on the Live experience.

Now that’s consistency for you.

For once I will not be speaking about a startup that completely failed, but a project created with one goal that then ended up focusing on another.

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Facebook will fail within three years

By Andrea Dusi in Famous Startups 4 Comments
Facebook will fail in 3 years

Facebook will fail within three years.

Foreword: I already know that this article will be the basis of strong discussion. I know that, but I am still convinced of what I just wrote.

Because if the world’s most popular social network does not drastically change, in three years, five max, it will no longer exist or at least it will no longer exist as we know it now.

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The Art that saved Airbnb from bankruptcy

By Andrea Dusi in Famous Startups 1 Comment
Airbnb survival

Who doesn’t know Airbnb, the famous portal that allows anyone to “sell”, for one or more nights, their personal home in exchange for a fee?

Born in 2008 in San Francisco , by the intuitive genius of Nathan Blecharczyk , Brian Chesky (now CEO of the company ) and Joe Gebbia , Airbnb is essentially an online bazaar of rooms, apartments, villas, castles: a virtual storefront with strong social components that in a few years has literally revolutionized the way we travel. Not for nothing is it now considered the main competitor to sites such as Booking and Trivago, which sell “traditional” hotel rooms.

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Despite 9 M US$ financing, Catch Notes has closed its operations

By Andrea Dusi in Famous Startups 0 Comment
Catch Notes system

Catch Notes, the popular competitor of the Evernote app, designed and created to take notes, has permanently closed its doors on August 30th, 2013.

To say that the sudden disappearance of this app has amazed fans is very little. The news of its closure, in fact, blew a huge and general “What the hell!”

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