SaaS Heaven

SaaS Heaven is a living archive of failed SaaS projects. Our mission is simple:

Learn from failure, not just success.

Every post-mortem on this site includes:

• Honest stats (MRR, users, duration)
• The story of what went wrong
• Lessons learned to guide future founders
• Links to the source code so you can explore, fork, or repurpose

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Browse Failures

You can browse all failed startups in the graveyard and read detailed post-mortems.

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How to Contribute

We welcome new post-mortems! To submit one:

1. Fork this repo
2. Add a folder under post-mortems/<slug>/
3. Include a data.json following the schema
4. Optionally include a README.md with extra context or reflections
5. Open a Pull Request using our PR template

Note: the slug must be lowercase, hyphenated, and unique.

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API

SaaS Heaven provides a simple read-only API to fetch post-mortems.

Get all post-mortems

GET /api/post-mortems

Response

• 200 OK – returns a list of all post-mortems with metadata

Example

{
  "updated_at": "2026-01-09T17:30:00.000Z",
  "count": 12,
  "post_mortems": [
    {
      "slug": "failing-startup",
      "name": "Failing Startup",
      "tagline": "A short-lived saas project",
      "snapshot": {
        "peak_mrr": 1200,
        "total_users": 450,
        "raised": 50000
      },
      "lessons": [
        "focused too much on features, not market",
        "launched too early"
      ]
    }
  ]
}

Get a post-mortem by slug

GET /api/post-mortems/[slug]

Response

• 200 OK – returns the post-mortem data in JSON
• 404 Not Found – if the slug doesn’t exist

Example

GET /api/post-mortems/failing-startup

{
  "slug": "failing-startup",
  "name": "Failing Startup",
  "tagline": "A short-lived SaaS project",
  "snapshot": {
    "peak_mrr": 1200,
    "total_users": 450,
    "raised": 50000
  },
  "lessons": [
    "focused too much on features, not market",
    "launched too early"
  ]
}

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Mission

We believe founders can learn faster, smarter, and with less wasted time by studying real-world failures.

By open-sourcing these stories, we hope to give founders a shortcut to insight — avoid mistakes, iterate faster, and build with more awareness.

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License

SaaS Heaven content is open-source and available under the MIT license. Feel free to fork, explore, and learn.