Article by Buzzfeed news titled 16 product fails that defined the decade. The subhead reads Failed Kickstarter projects, flammable gadgets, and investment bubbles were tech’s biggest flops of the decade. The intro reads This decade saw the rise of subscription services, Kickstarter-backed gadgets, and radical new ideas that aimed to disrupt every industry on the planet. Risky ventures were commonplace: Building a product from scratch, designing a new business model, and raising money based on faith in some prospective growth or feature were standard issue — and, under that framework, both tiny startups and tech titans that became victims of their own ambition. The 2010s saw many tech flops. But what sets these failures apart is that they taught us something about how adept tech companies (and purported “tech companies”) had become at marketing themselves based on an optimistic future — and how much consumers and investors wanted to believe that the promised innovation was real. Here are the defeated ventures that defined the decade. Then the article lists the name of each product fail followed by a write-up about each. Number 16 reads 16. MoviePass (2011–2019) MoviePass seemed too good to be true because it was too good to be true. Subscribers could watch an IRL movie a day for a month, all for just $9.95, less than the cost of a single ticket. Millions signed up. But the business model didn’t make any sense: MoviePass was forking over the full price to theaters, while its moviegoers were paying just a fraction. The deal didn’t last. In 2018, MoviePass said it was hemorrhaging tens of millions of dollars every month in an SEC filing. Plus, theaters, envious of the MoviePass’s success, created their own copycat versions and tacked on extra perks, like popcorn discounts. In September 2019, the service shut down, but not before a massive data breach of customers’ credit card information. MoviePass, like many other VC-funded startups that focused more on growth than profits, dangled irresistible, subsidized prices in front of consumers. Eventually, someone had to pay full price. Article continues.