Yes<p>Here's a lesson, (learned personally BTW).<p>When you hear '90% of startups fail', failing usually means they <i>wane</i>.<p>It's like flying a kite (by someone bad at it). You can run with your kite and make it 'fly' but then you get tired and it falls to the ground. It can be a hundred reasons, it is either a bad/defective kite, it may not be windy enough, or you have to run faster for it to fly.
The write up does not address anything interesting. It doesn't even say why the company failed. Not enough users? Not enough revenue? Failures of technology? Not worth reading.<p>A thank you letter to users is not a post mortem.
The problem here wasn't the premise really. I mean from a premise standpoint (when it launched) Twitter seemed pretty silly. They got over it by simply adapting from status updates to brain dumps and then it really took off.<p>The problem here was planning.<p>No one seems to have sat down there and thought it through with: What are we doing? How do we do it? Do we have the means? Do we have the capability? <i>Are we going about this the right way?</i><p>"The landing page didn’t work in IE. It was buggy." Did no one open up the page in IE before launch? See what I mean about planning. It's unfortunate because these guys seemed to have cared about their product.<p><pre><code> ...chef Anthony Bourdain, who wrote our epitaph in Kitchen Confidential: "The most dangerous species of owner ... is the one who gets into the business for love."
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I lifted that from the end of this page:
<a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/life/a_fine_whine/2005/12/bitter_brew.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.slate.com/articles/life/a_fine_whine/2005/12/bitt...</a><p>In a way, that too is an example of poor planning.
<i>How cool would it be if I could recommend a new friend for you to go skiing or golfing with, based on how much overlap you had in common (Friends, Schools, Hobbies, etc). Pretty cool, right?</i><p>Doesn't sound cool to me. The most interesting relationships I have are the ones where there is not a huge overlap. They are more interesting.
Not trying to be douchy, but am I the only one that doesn't understand why there are so many people trying to redefine social networking and the next big photo sharing app?
Did you get any funding at all?<p>Did you make at least $1 of profit? Gross?<p>The "meeting people" problem is asymmetrical. You have a bunch of people who want to meet new people. Unfortunately the type of people they want to meet already know so many people they are not looking to meet new people. Lots of people want to meet Katy Perry; She's probably a bit tired of people wanting to talk to her. How did you go about addressing this issue?
I met Phil at a chance encounter at Think Coffee in NYC and Mark Cuban happened to be there. In an awkward situation in which everyone was trying to impress Cuban, Phil came off as a genuine and nice guy. Good luck to you on the next thing.
I thought it was Meteor and was scared for a moment. Whew!<p>Sorry founder(s) but no-one apparently cared much about your site. It happens to the best of us.
When working on new concepts of human interactions, may be we need to rely more on social science than technology.
Having a ton of information on people, may not be enough to predict with whom they want to hangout.
I wonder if big companies like Google and Facebook, used focus group and social science before launching g+ and “Graph Search”. I hope they did.
I think branding an idea as '2.0' was your first mistake. Pretty much meeteor was ambitious to innovate a new feature to social networking, but since that ideology is more in my opinion a 'soft' science, I think funding would have been difficult to make it sustainable.