Problem

I started noticing more and more headlines about startups’ layoffs. It was hard to see the real situation, so I wanted to understand if it was an alarming trend or just too much buzz in the media.

Solution

A website collecting (and displaying) information about layoffs, grouped by month, number of employees fired by the company, and source URL. Visually displaying a timeline graph of the volumes.

Status: Archived

After initial scooping through the articles and announcements, which I did myself, I wanted to see if anybody was interested to contribute to the data collection and opened a communication channel where people could submit their layoff information. Hardly anyone contributed and it was too time-consuming to keep doing it manually myself.

Learnings

• Layoff data is not important enough for people to contribute to (even anonymously).

• Startups are not obliged to report their layoffs, which makes it almost impossible to get real data.

• Various sources communicate different numbers for the same layoff, which makes it more time-consuming to aggregate the data from various different websites.