FailTell: A Bootstrapped Platform That Turned Failure Stories Into a Mentoring Business
Two co-founders in Bhubaneswar built a free community around failure stories, then expanded into paid career mentoring and counseling, reaching 11,000 users before shutting down in 2024.
Part of Early-stage builders
Business snapshot
Monthly revenue
≈₹1 lakh/mo
$1,100/mo · reported Nov 2021
- Business model
- Course or coaching
- Started
- Aug 2020
- Team
- 2 founders + 6 staff
- Based in
- Bhubaneswar, Odisha, India
- Monthly active users
- 1,100
- Total user base
- 11,000
- Monthly revenue
- $1,100
- Stories published
- 100
- Expert network
- 220+
Tools
- AWS
- MongoDB Atlas
- Docker
- Kubernetes
- GitHub
- Jira
- Figma
- Canva
- Slack
- Zoom
- Medium
Founder-reported figures, not independently verified. ₹ amounts use the ECB reference rate rate of Oct 2026 (₹94.82/$).
Who built it, and what they built
Swagat Mohanty co-founded FailTell with Rahul Mohanty in Bhubaneswar, Odisha, India. The online platform offered services spanning mental health support, career mentoring, life coaching, and counseling, all aimed at helping people deal with failure and personal or professional challenges.
The business employed six people and ran from August 2020 until it shut down in 2024.
Where the idea came from
The idea grew out of the pandemic, when the founders saw stress, loneliness, and career uncertainty affect their own families and friends. They noticed that no single platform existed where people could openly share stories of failure rather than success.
FailTell launched on August 4, 2020 as a free community called Failure Prism, built around real-life stories of overcoming setbacks. Both founders kept their day jobs at the time and bootstrapped the venture themselves.
Their career mentoring knowledge came from a college club that connected alumni with students for one-to-one guidance. For counseling and coaching, they leaned on a team member with domain expertise and conversations with family and friends before entering the field.
How they built the first version
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