Venture Trail: see who's already tried your startup idea - Showcase Project

Most "startup failure" content is either survivorship-bias hype or a scraped listicle with a one-line summary and no sources. Venture Trail is a research archive of 2,650+ real startups, funded, bootstrapped, acquired, and shut down, built so you can check a new idea against what's already been tried before you build it. A large part of the research, funding history, cause of failure, what actually happened, has been personally studied and researched, with real cited sources for every claim, rather than scraped and reformatted from an existing list. What's in the archive: 2,650+ company profiles with real financials, founders, timelines, and sourced facts Full postmortems for shut-down companies, not "it failed," but the actual documented cause Evaluate: describe your idea in a sentence and get a grounded verdict citing only the closest real precedents, built to say "not enough data" rather than invent a confident answer Alerts: get emailed when a company matching your interests launches, raises, gets acquired, or shuts down Compare: line up funding, outcome, and cause of failure across companies side by side Watchlist: bookmark companies you're tracking, free for any account Claim your profile: founders of companies in the archive can claim and correct their own record Venture Trail is $20/month or $150/year. Search and browse are free for anyone, and a 7-day free trial unlocks full company profiles before you pay for postmortems, Evaluate, Alerts, and Compare. Built solo by a software engineer with a long-standing interest in how companies are actually built and run, at a moment when AI-assisted coding makes it trivial to ship an app in a weekend, and easier than ever to build something that's already been tried.