Short answer : Medium.

Yes, I am serious. Once a startup dies, and the investor(s) have been notified of the burial date, preparations are made to find an everlasting place for it to spend the rest of the file (or life). And Medium has been a good burial ground.

Countless of once highly valued startups have taken their rightful spot on the journey to eternal devaluation. And it’s the reasonable thing to do, because most of these startups were birthed on Medium too. For instance, Firefox OS was brought to life and its death was announced on the platform.

African startups have taken to the platforms especially well. There are cases like the VoD service AfroStream that died after 2 years of launching, GoMyWay the carpooling and ridesharing service, ShowRoom the furniture and interior design service.

“Well, from Radar it came & to Radar it returned.”

A close second platforms that host these burials is Techcabal’s Radar. As can be seen in the case of hubrif, another VoD platform, and many other products.

The reason for this article is not to mock the hard work of entrepreneurs or belittle the passion their team has for the product but to implore. A lot of startups describe what they did wrong and what could have happened if they had more funds. But I feel that a post mortem should be more. It should be a product development guide. More importantly, it should give the data they have gathered to the public for research and education.

For example, if a real estate product announces its demise, I would love to see a data scientist pick at their dataset. Students in tertiary institutions will have better tools and resources to work with. Like the report on the Firefox Os linked above, it was informational and proved to be a reference for history of mobile operating systems. Ergo, that data will probably lay fallow after the announcement when it could be put to proper and extensive use by successors and the general web populace.

Giving back to the community helps to cement the legacy of that startup in the hearts of those who used it. If you have built a tool that works pretty well but you can't get paying clients, you can probably find a community that would help host it and offload the costing from you. Then you have one less thing to worry about and they have a tool or dataset that works wonders. Its a win-win for everyone.

In a post on Signal2Noise, selling your by products is explained as being profitable. Find something useful in your firm, and offload. That the product is dead doesn't mean there is no value it can offer to some other person.