Picnic in the Graveyard

Do research on what's been tried and failed

Difficulty: Very easy

Evidence strength
15

Relevant metrics: Founder feedback, Old customer feedback

Validates: Desirability, Viability, Feasibility

How: Search for the last ten startups to try your idea and learn from them. Explore the products and their features if they are still online, talk to the customers, and call the founders - many are very friendly.

Why: Your idea is not unique. Many near misses have two out of three values in a feature set combination correct. If you are going to introduce something that's 'been tried before' be clear in your own mind of what's different about it and why it will make a difference to your customer.

This product discovery method is part of the Discovery Patterns printed card deck

A collection of clever product discovery methods that help you get to the bottom of customer needs and coining the right problem before building solutions. They are regularly used by product builders at companies like Google, Facebook, Dropbox, and Amazon.

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When product teams set out to build something new, there’s often a rush to start from a blank canvas: filled with optimism, creativity, and hypotheses. But some of the most valuable insights come not from greenfield ideation, but from the tombstones of startups and products that didn’t survive. The “Picnic in the Graveyard” is a lean research method that encourages teams to pause and examine past product failures similar to their idea before moving forward.

Most innovation stories are told through the lens of the survivors. But the ecosystem of past failures contains just as much, if not more, useful data.

This technique isn’t about celebrating failure - it’s about understanding it. By taking time to analyze what went wrong for others who tried something similar, you can avoid repeating their mistakes, refine your own ideas, and improve your odds of success. In product discovery, Picnic in the Graveyard is a high-leverage, low-cost step that de-risks early concept development.

What is a Picnic in the Graveyard?

The method is simple: identify products, startups, features, services, that attempted to solve the same problem or serve the same audience as you. These might be direct predecessors, parallel attempts in other markets, or lesser-known ventures that quietly folded. The goal is to study these “near misses” to uncover patterns, assumptions, and structural flaws that contributed to their downfall.

This is a form of generative research, looking outward to generate insight from others’ real-world experience. Teams gather data about what these products offered, how they positioned themselves, what feedback they received, and what ultimately caused them to shut down. This can involve desk research, social listening, founder interviews, and even forensic analysis of old websites via the Internet Archive.

Done well, the method leads to better-informed assumptions, sharper positioning, and more resilient product models.

To avoid analysis paralysis, it’s important to timebox the research, spending 1–2 days identifying 3–5 relevant “graves” is often enough. More than that can overwhelm and slow down decision-making.

Why examining past failures is useful for product discovery

Innovation often overemphasizes differentiation: how are we different from what came before? But in doing so, teams can miss the more foundational question: why did what came before fail?

Picnic in the Graveyard helps identify:

Feature traps: products that built too much, too early, or the wrong thing altogether.
Market timing misfires: solutions that arrived before users were ready, or after interest had peaked.
Business model mismatches: unsustainable pricing, costly infrastructure, or flawed monetization.
Usability and adoption issues: friction points that blocked conversion, onboarding, or retention.

By examining these factors, teams gain clarity on what not to build, and why. They also identify what users did like about these past products, offering clues to preserve or reframe what was nearly right.

This research is also a valuable asset for investor conversations. Being able to articulate why similar products failed, and what you’re doing differently, not only shows due diligence but also strengthens confidence in your strategic thinking.

How to run a Picnic in the Graveyard experiment

Start with desk research. Use resources like Startup Graveyard (startupgraveyard.io), the Internet Archive (archive.org), Crunchbase, and product review forums. Create a short list of companies or products that were similar in goal, model, or audience.

Then explore:

What was their core value proposition?
How did they position themselves in the market?
What did early users say about the experience?
How long did they last, and what caused them to shut down?
Were there public postmortems or founder reflections?

If possible, reach out directly to former employees or founders. Many are surprisingly open to sharing what they learned, especially if approached with humility and genuine curiosity. Use prompts such as:

“What do you wish you had known at the start?”
“What was your biggest assumption that turned out to be wrong?”
“What problem were you really solving for users, and did they agree?”
“What would you do differently if you tried again?”
“What part of your solution worked well that others overlooked?”

Also, monitor social media and user forums for real-time commentary on defunct products. Reddit threads, old Product Hunt pages, and app reviews are often rich with insight into what people hoped for, and where expectations weren’t met.

Questions to further guide the research

“What were the core problems the product aimed to solve?”
“What worked well for early users, and what didn’t?”
“Was failure due to the product itself, the business model, timing, team, or something else?”
“What assumptions did they validate, and which turned out to be false?”
“How does our idea differ meaningfully from what they attempted?”
“What new constraints or capabilities do we have that they didn’t?”

To ensure you don’t make the same mistakes, analyze not just the product, but the business model behind it. Was monetization feasible? Did customer acquisition cost outweigh lifetime value? Were there operational barriers the team couldn’t overcome?

This analysis helps test for whether the failure was based on fixable execution issues, or deeper problems of timing, fit, or viability that still apply today.

Use startup failure databases

Online resources like failory.com offers case studies on failed startups. Learn from the past mistakes of others by analyzing and identifying failure patterns. Then refine their strategies to avoid similar pitfalls, effectively leveraging the lessons learned from others’ experiences to validate your own product ideas and market fit.

Outputs and what to do with them

The results of a Picnic in the Graveyard are often qualitative. They may take the form of research notes, synthesis memos, annotated timelines, or even pitch slide updates. Their influence shows up in key product and strategy decisions:

Revising your assumptions and hypotheses
Pivoting to a new segment or use case
Simplifying your MVP or feature scope
Prioritizing interviews with users who tried (and quit) those past tools
Adjusting your pricing model or go-to-market strategy
Flagging market conditions or buyer behaviors that may have changed since the earlier attempt

You can also develop a comparative matrix that lays out past failures next to your idea, highlighting what’s changed: technology, channels, awareness, costs, or user behavior. This tool helps you articulate, and test, what you believe will make your version succeed.

When to Use This Method

This technique is especially valuable when:

Entering a crowded or well-attempted market
Working on a novel product that sounds familiar
You’ve heard “didn’t someone already try that?” from investors or peers
Your team is confident in an idea but light on competitive context

It’s also effective in pre-seed and early concept stages, before significant time, money, or engineering has been committed. In some cases, this research has saved founders months of effort or helped them discover a more promising variation of the original idea.

Pair this method with:

Assumption mapping to identify risky beliefs inherited from past failures
Customer interviews to validate if users still want what those products promised
Business model canvases to test for structural viability
Surveys to gauge market awareness or sentiment tied to defunct products
Clickable or data sheet prototypes to explore whether newer execution strategies address old blockers

These companion tools help ensure you’re not only learning from the past, but testing for whether the conditions that led to those failures are still present.

The goal isn’t to become paralyzed by past failure or fall into over-analysis. There’s always a risk of hindsight bias or unjustified optimism (“they just didn’t execute well, we will”). The point is not to avoid building, but to build more deliberately.

Picnic in the Graveyard should challenge your team’s assumptions, not crush your ambition. It’s a form of respectful pragmatism: honoring the lessons of others so that your team doesn’t have to learn them the hard way.

An invitation to learn

Most innovation stories are told through the lens of the survivors. But the ecosystem of past failures contains just as much, if not more, useful data. Picnic in the Graveyard is a way to shift your learning upstream: to study what’s already happened, so you can better shape what happens next.

For teams practicing continuous discovery, this method offers a foundational layer of evidence. Before testing ideas with users, test them against history. Before running experiments, examine the experiments others already ran. Before building something “new,” take a walk through what’s already been tried.

It’s not a warning. It’s an invitation to learn, and then move forward, better equipped than before.

Popular tools

The tools below will help you with the Picnic in the Graveyard play.

Internet Archive (Wayback Machine)
A free tool that allows you to explore historical snapshots of websites, helping you analyze the positioning, content, and evolution of failed or defunct products.
Startup Graveyard
A curated database of failed startups with summaries of their business models, causes of failure, and additional links to founder postmortems.
Crunchbase
A platform for discovering information about past startups, including funding history, founders, and acquisition status—helpful for tracing market trajectories and shutdowns.
Failory
Learn from startup failures and successes. The stories, frameworks, and tactics that will make you a 10x better founder.

Examples

Vuzix

The VR and AR technology company based its product design on the learnings taken from the less successful Google Glass, making its products more comfortable, more subtle and easier to use.

Source: bmilab.com