The Site So Advanced It DELETED Itself: Boo.com

Boo.com was flashy, expensive, and completely unusable. It burned through around $135 million in just 6 months. A staggering number for a startup. Especially one that had barely gotten off the ground. The Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet described it as a blurry version of hell. And users across the world agreed.

Ambitious entrepreneurs (Ernst Malmsten and Kajsa Leander) set out to change the world of online shopping forever. Their goal was simple on paper. Build the most advanced fashion website ever created. A global online store where users could buy shoes and clothes with the help of a digital assistant called Miss Boo. Customers could zoom in on fabric textures. Spin items around in three dimensions. And interact with a site that looked more like a video game than a retail page.

But pages took minutes to load. Features didn’t work. Error messages popped up everywhere. The site was overloaded with animations and high-resolution images that most internet connections at the time simply couldn’t handle. It was a vision that outpaced reality.

But the leadership team at Boo.com didn’t see it that way. They were convinced they were building something revolutionary. They raised tens of millions. Then spent it just as fast. Their confidence never wavered. Even as complaints rolled in. Even as reviews slammed the company. Even as users abandoned the site.

Behind the scenes, the team struggled to patch the problems. But every fix created new issues. Investors kept pumping in more money. And Boo.com kept falling apart.

The platform promised a seamless online shopping experience. What it delivered was frustration. Confusion. And ultimately, total collapse.

Boo.com shut down in 2000. Just one year after its launch. It had become the perfect symbol of the dot com boom’s recklessness. A high-profile failure that embodied everything that went wrong during the era.

What makes the Boo.com story so remarkable isn’t just the speed at which it failed. It’s how eerily familiar its promises sound today. Product zoom. Item rotation. AI-powered shopping assistants. These are standard features now. But in the late 1990s, the technology wasn’t ready. The infrastructure didn’t exist. And the market had no patience.

This video explores how a dream to reinvent fashion retail became one of the biggest startup disasters in history. We’ll take you through the vision, the leadership, the tech, the hype, and the financial disaster that followed.

You’ll learn how Boo.com was born from ambition. Fueled by fantasy. And brought down by its refusal to face reality.

It wasn’t just a failed website. It was the end of an era. The moment when people stopped believing the internet could do anything. And started asking what it should do instead.

00:00 1999 Boo.com dream
00:14 The nightmare
00:49 Boo.com’s founders and vision
01:19 Too ahead of its time
01:33 Site performance problems
01:54 Investors keep funding it
02:35 Public backlash
03:15 Leadership denial
03:36 The final days
03:51 Why Boo.com Failed