Whatsitallabout?

Welcome to Bankrupt Businesses. We aim to keep you up to date with the latest Credit Crunch news. Who is on the scrapheap today? Which great high-street name is the latest to go under? Who are the latest employees to have joined the dole queue?

We will attempt to look beyond the hand-wringing press releases and try to offer some lazily-researched analysis as to why the company (and it's workers) have found themselves in trouble. There will be a bit of gallows-humour too.

After all, not all companies will go bankrupt. It stands to reason that, in an economic downturn, the devil takes the hindmost. Bad times + bad business model = a whole lot of trouble. The lame gazelles get eaten when the lions turn up for lunch. Some businesses deserve to go to the wall.

A month ago, we launched a site called isaycool.com. Since then, indifference has been at fever-pitch. Why? Because the site isn't good enough. Here was the plan:

Create a website where users could upload anything they wanted, as a subject matter. Other users could then vote on whether they thought that it was cool, uncool, or that they didn't really care. Then they could see how everyone else voted.

We wanted a site that was virtually limitless in it's subject matter. Celebrities, politicians, sports stars, businesses, institutions, products, beliefs, ideas and anything else you can think of.

To encourage people to upload stuff, we enabled anyone who did so to add a link (with each subject) to their own website. The idea was that, for example, someone who ran an online store selling prints of famous artists would upload as many famous painters as they could think of - each with a link back to their own site.

We hoped that the site would quickly become viral. That word would quickly spread and that users would scramble to upload subjects before anyone else did. We bought some traffic and waited to see how it would all pan out.

We are still waiting. Why? Obvious really. It's not a good enough idea. It's just another 'rate-me' site and not interesting enough. Our business idea is failing. We need to make it better, or it's just been a waste of time. Help! We need ideas. We have some of our own, but they might not be very good, so any contributions (even abusive) are welcome!

This blog is about failing businesses - and our own failing business. As a blog, it may well be poorly written and short-lived, but we wll give t a go. If it is about kicking people when they are down, then we cannot complain if we end up with our foot in our mouth from time to time, can we?