We as a country have had our failures comprising of major businesses, companies, and startups that failed in Australia in the last few years.

In this blog, we will discuss – what led to those failures and lessons learned from failures.

I know you hate us when we write articles like these but all is not dark and gloomy, i have also recently published a blog with the list of most successful businesses and startups in Australia.

You can straight away head to the article if you are looking for “positivity” 🙂

In this article, the positive stuff you will find is “learning from failures”.

We will be listing the learning from these failures, and you can (probably) use the learning to run your startup or business better.

We live in an era where – “the conventional us” have all our trust placed in companies or traditional businesses. Startups for us is a cool business started by a youngster who plans to get rich very soon.

However, some stats could dispel such a belief.

“Australian startup firms less than two years old were responsible for driving the 1.6m net new jobs created between 2003–2014, while on a net basis, large firms made a little contribution” – Dept of Industry, Innovation and Science, 2016.

In 2017, LaunchVic identified 1600+ startups in Australia alone.

In 2018, Startup Muster reported that Victoria accounts for 14.4% of Australian startups.

According to PwC, the Australian tech startup sector (companies with <$5m in annual revenue) has the potential to: Contribute $109bn (4% of GDP) to the Australian economy; and Generate 5,40,000 jobs by 2033.



All the above stats were from the medium account of airtree ventures. (Source: https://medium.com/airtree-venture/its-all-about-jobs-b0794040f43d)

To all the naysayers – startups are more than just an enthusiastic kid’s dream of changing the world. They do contribute positively to the economy.

However, the failure rate is 90% in startups in Australia. If the stats are to be believed – about 9 in 10 startups fail.

When we were writing the article, the question we asked ourselves was – ‘should we introspect the nine that failed or the minority 20% that excelled and survived?’

The easier route would have been to analyse the success stories, but it would be a grave injustice to our readership.

The readership that has come to rely on us for publishing a failed startup list every year for a specific country.

So this time, we decided to touch Australia and look at the major failed businesses and startups in Australia.

The growth of startups in Australia hasn’t followed a graph that over the years only moves up from left to right.

As per statistics, there were 1,675 startups in 2017, and the number dropped to 1,465 in 2018 – a 12.5 percent decrease in one year.

The drop came after a steady growth from 712 startups in 2016 to 1,291 startups in 2017.

We still could not find the reason for the drop. However, we did explore further to look at the reason for this impediment. i.e., what is it that stopped entrepreneurs from starting new startups.

As per 2018 stats by the Small Business Administration (SBA)- around within the first year of following the steps to register a company and getting started, one-fifth of businesses fail. After 10 years, the survival rate is one-third of the surviving startups. (source: https://www.businessknowhow.com/startup/business-failure.htm)

While it is said that, it takes a minimum of four years before you’ve actually ‘set-up’ your business, seven to ten years is what you’re looking to see your initial plan come true. (As long as you’re realistic)

Now that’s a long time with a lot of hard work and high certainty of failure.

And then, there was an interesting study by the Australian Centre for business growth. According to the study – The reason why startups fail in Australia can be attributed to the following factors:

Poor Market research

Bad Financial Management

No control over external factors

Bad Leadership skills

No Planning or bad execution

They were the top 5 reasons that accounted for 70% of business failures in Australia (source: https://centreforbusinessgrowth.com/news-and-events/five-reasons-companies-fail/)

Now those were some interesting statistics for you. Time to move to the list for which you are on the blog.

Oh, Wait! We have one more interesting stat to share with you regarding how many small businesses fail in Australia and what percentage of small businesses fail in Australia:

As per research by data and analytics provider illion – In the year 2018, 54,992 small businesses closed in Australia. The number was 12.7% more than the number of small businesses that closed in the year 2018 (source: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-10-31/small-business-failures-on-the-rise/10447846)

Let’s get down to the list: