Inspiration
Startups fail all the time—but just successful founders talk about it. We wanted to build a platform where failure becomes normal, stories are shared, and lessons are learned. By embracing the unfiltered side of entrepreneurship, we built a place where founders assist each other to grow—by being honest about what failed.
What it does
NextUp is a site for startup founders to share anonymously or publicly their failure stories — so others can learn from their failures. It features a feed of real startup issues, voting and responses, AI-summarized key points, messaging, and a "Learn" dashboard that extracts common failure patterns and visualizes insights. It's a combination of Reddit, Medium, and BetterHelp — but for startup struggles.
How we built it
Frontend: Fully developed in React with JSX components and conditional views
Styling: Utility classes based on Tailwind (or inline CSS) for responsive, modern UI
State Management: React useState() to control view switching, posting, voting, and messaging
AI Summary: A placeholder AI function provides summaries; set to be integrated with OpenAI or Claude later
Charts: chart.js and react-chartjs-2 are utilized to create interactive graphs in the Learn tab
Anonymity: They can post anonymously and choose visibility but still engage with replies and votes
Challenges we ran into
Handling anonymous posts without losing the ability to vote and respond securely
Ensuring Chart.js components coexisted nicely with React's modular design (fixing the "linear" scale bug)
Correctly updating post state between views without bugs (especially with anonymous toggling)
Designing a flow that worked well: from landing page → profile setup → full feed + learning dashboard
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Produced a product that we would consider using for our entrepreneurship
Implemented technical components in a clean, multi-view React app with live state interactions
Created a new startup concept that isn't about success — but about what not to do
Designed an experience that feels personal, useful, and community-driven for up-and-coming founders
What we learned
How to structure multi-view React apps with smooth transitions and composable state
Made our understanding of chart.js more profound, and how to display responsive, interactive data graphics
Aspects of app design to prioritize user accessibility and comfort
What's next for NextUp
Add authentication to enable users to manage accounts and follow other founders
Enable users to label posts with tags like "hardware", "AI", "B2B", etc.
Add real AI summarization using OpenAI or Claude API
Refine the voting and feedback system to rank the most useful lessons
Enable users to follow specific lessons learned and share curated "mistake playbooks"
Launch publicly to allow more founders to learn from each other — and fail forward
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