(A lack of focus wasn’t 5 Minutes’ only problem, though; it was also bleeding staffers thanks to an inexperienced management team, and losing that round of financing is probably also indicative of poor management.)
If you’re interested in lessons from more failed Chinese startups, Ding Chenling has a whole heap of them for you to wade through. But the big lesson here is to learn from other people’s failures instead of making these mistakes yourself. So if you’re doing a startup in China, really ask yourself whether you could be making any of the mistakes these companies made. They were all well-funded, and many of them were well on their way to success when mistakes brought them crashing back down to earth. Don’t let that be you.