You asked about Retail
6 people built something like it. 6 are gone.
That is 100% of the ones whose fate we could settle, against 23% across the whole register.
| Launched | What it was | Today |
|---|---|---|
| 2012-06-01 | YCThread Thread makes it incredibly easy to dress well, using stylists and AI · thread.com | gone |
| 2020-01-01 | YCSprintAI AI-led platform for inventory and fulfillment optimization · getsprint.ai | gone |
| 2021-06-01 | Building Gong.io for offline retail. · outloud.ai | gone |
| 2021-06-01 | Mobile app for CPG brands to connect to millions of stores globally · milkyway.ai | gone |
| 2019-01-01 | We make $1,000 Amazon Go stores. · maitian.ai | gone |
| 2023-06-01 | AI Overview Search, as a Service · branch-ai.com | gone |
How this compares
The register re-probes every domain it holds. Some that answered last month stop answering. We send that list — what went quiet, and what it was — once a month. Nothing else.
How this was made. Show HN entries are every post from 2021 to 2023 with at least five points that linked to its own domain; code hosts and free hosting are excluded, because a repository outlives the effort behind it. Product Hunt entries needed 100 votes — a far higher bar, so they are the promoted top slice rather than a like-for-like sample. Both are judged by asking the domain whether it still answers: gone means it no longer resolves, refuses the connection, serves a parking page, or says plainly that it shut down. An HTTP error is not counted as gone — a server answering 404 is one somebody still pays for, and an audit of 25 gone-calls found two such sites alive with only a moved homepage. Y Combinator entries use the status YC publishes itself, which is why only those can say acquired. Squatted domains — a lapsed name now serving somebody else's site — are not detected, so these figures run slightly low.