We watched 101 founder interviews. 49.5% openly discussed failure. We coded every failure mode into a structured data set, packaged it as a Claude skill you can install, and wrote the editorial series no one wants to write.
Most founder content is "things I wish I knew" rewrites. This is the inverse: we transcribed and tagged 101 long-form founder interviews on Starter Story, extracted every failure-related claim, and structured them into a taxonomy. Then we shipped that taxonomy three ways — as a Claude skill, as a public data set, and as an editorial series.
Install solo-failures in Claude Desktop and ask it to diagnose your situation, pre-mortem your plan, or post-mortem a failure. It ranks risks by data, not vibes.
Failure modes, frequencies, root causes, anti-patterns. Open patterns.json on GitHub. Use it for your own research, dashboards, or content.
One essay per failure mode. The first card pack — "Why startups die · 7 hard truths" — is out as a Xiaohongshu image series and long-form post.
Every claim below is grounded in a count from the 101-video corpus. Click through to the essay (where shipped) for the kill mechanism, early warning signs, and the cheapest intervention.
The skill takes your current situation (in-flight crisis / pre-launch plan / post-failure recap) and matches it against the failure-mode corpus. It returns the top 1–3 failure modes that fit, the chain of how this one actually kills you, the early warning signs, what the 101 founders did to survive, and one concrete next move for the next 48 hours.
"I've been building a B2B SaaS in stealth for 8 months. $15k savings left, no users, planning Product Hunt next month. 14-hour days, no day off in 6 weeks."
→ matches: building-without-validation (11) · burnout (12) · no-safety-net (8). Concrete next move: get one paying customer this week or stop coding.| Corpus | 101 long-form Starter Story founder interviews · transcript + annotation |
|---|---|
| Failure rate | 49.5% of videos discussed failure openly (50 / 101) — base rate for the taxonomy |
| Coding scheme | Categories: Challenges/FailuresValidationCost/ExpensesAdvice/Lessons |
| Top 7 modes | By video-count: 15 / 13 / 12 / 11 / 10 / 8 / 7 — full counts in patterns.json |
| Skill format | Claude skill (Markdown spec + JSON knowledge base) · installable in Claude Desktop & Claude Code |
| License | Data: CC-BY 4.0 · Skill: MIT · Editorial series: all rights reserved |
| Source | github.com/yayashuxue/solo-failures |
One mail per failure mode. No drip campaign.
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