Most people who "can't keep a starter alive" are making the same three mistakes. I've helped dozens of home bakers fix these — here's what I see over and over:

1. You're feeding on a schedule instead of reading the starter.

Every recipe says "feed every 12 hours." But your kitchen isn't the same temperature as theirs. A starter in an 18°C Scandinavian kitchen needs a completely different rhythm than one in a 28°C apartment. Feed based on activity, not the clock.

2. You're using too much flour per feed.

Overfeeding is the #1 cause of "my starter never rises." If you're dumping 100g flour into a sluggish culture, you're just diluting the bacteria before they can build momentum. Start with a 1:1:1 ratio at a smaller scale — 20g starter, 20g flour, 20g water.

3. You're throwing it out too early.

A new starter takes 10-14 days to stabilize. Days 3-7 are the ugly phase — it smells bad, barely moves, and you think it's dead. It's not. The good bacteria are still colonizing. Push through.

If you want a dead-simple system to maintain your starter without waste or guesswork, that's exactly what I built Starter School for. We keep it simple, we keep it alive.