You can't even say that a product failed because nobody wanted it. All you can say is that nobody you asked was willing to pay what you were asking. I've seen plenty of promising products die because the company wants to only offer it as a service with ridiculous licensing requirements presumably out of fear that some customer is going to build a billion dollar business out of it and not give them a cut of the gross.

It has to be really frustrating for startup CEOs to fold and then see a bad copy of their idea appear as free software and explode in popularity.

  but if I did I would view every single step...

To a first approximation, everyone knows this and at least tells themselves it is what they are doing.

The real problem is that is hard. In the vast majority of cases, much harder than the tech & engineering you are doing.