1,040 failures happened before these successes
99% of documented journeys record at least one experiment that did not work: an abandoned channel, a wrong price, a product cut in half. The catalog, by category, in the founders' own words.
Based on 462 documented journeys · data regenerated 2026-08-31
What failed, by category
Product scope206
Marketing channel192
Operations177
Technology choice106
Pricing94
Team89
Positioning80
Audience segment52
Fundraising44
Validation catches some of this early: of 712 documented validation steps, 26 invalidated the idea being tested — each one a failure that cost days instead of months.
The post-mortems
Product scope206 documented
“The only real failure that I actually launched was Nitpick CI”
Adam Wathan, Tailwind CSSIndie Hackers AMA: "I'm Adam Wathan, I created Tailwind CSS and built a multi-million dollar business around it. AMA!"“I had been shooting myself in the foot by having too many other projects. Freelance clients were a distraction too.”
Adrian Horning, Scrape CreatorsIndie Hackers: "Growing a scraping API to $10k+MRR in 12 months" (Adrian's own first-person account)Marketing channel192 documented
“The docs are the only way people find out about our commercial products, and without customers we can't afford to maintain the framework.”
Adam Wathan, Tailwind CSSAdam Wathan's comments on tailwindlabs/tailwindcss.com PR #2388 (llms.txt request) explaining the 2026 engineering layoffs“Paid ads require trust-building elements: tested landing pages, retargeting, and iterative copy.”
Adrien (AdrienBrb), PostClaw"$300 MRR in 7 days. Here's exactly how I launched PostClaw." (Adrien, Indie Hackers)Operations177 documented
“perfectionism and self-doubt made me quit every time”
Adam Enfroy, AdamEnfroy.comAdam Enfroy: "My Story"“I should have spent more time improving products already making money instead of constantly starting new ones.”
Sergiu Chiriac, AI DirectoriesSergiu Chiriac, "Building for himself and growing his portfolio to $10k+/mo" (Indie Hackers /post/)Technology choice106 documented
“I quickly realized Squarespace's limitations, so I moved my site to WordPress”
Adam Enfroy, AdamEnfroy.comAdam Enfroy: "My Story"“they work in Python and I’m a Javascript dev, so it didn’t work out”
Adrian Horning, Scrape CreatorsIndie Hackers: "Here's how I made $20k in three days with a web scraping course" (told "in his own words")Pricing94 documented
“I tried it, but chickened out because I got lots of signups for the free version and none for the paid version.”
Adriaan van Rossum, Simple AnalyticsSimple Analytics blog — "How we hit our $30k ARR milestone"“people want to use Descript without worrying about how many minutes they've used”
Andrew Mason, DescriptAndrew Mason - "Descript 2.0" (Descript Medium blog)Run this against your own numbers
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