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Imzy is a company that came, raised over $10MM in funding, and went out of business in 7 months. This is the first I've heard of them.
How on earth does that happen? It's inexplicable.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, ~10 employees in SF + office rent + other various costs (lawyers, accountants, the odd office party, etc.) will easily burn through $4M a year. Edit: oh wait, that's $8M in October 2016, not 2015 - ie 8 months ago. Burning $1M a month does seem quite high. Maybe they're shutting down early to give some money back to investors?
We're in SLC and still have the majority of that money left.
I checked out Imzy a couple of weeks ago: 1. Barrier to entry was a login (I had previously gone here and left when it first started, and didn't sign in. I eventually created an account just to check it out.) 2. Interface was confusing 3. Exploration felt difficult 4. It wasn't immediately obvious why I was there 5. Not enough juice/content to bring me back tl;dr: Social networks + open domain communities are hard.
Look at Twitter. It wasn't a revolutionary UX masterpiece in the beginning, it was useful.
Imzy was never useful. It's not useful to talk to a bunch of people who need censorship to feel comfortable talking to other humans. I'd argue it's the least rewarding group of people to have a conversation with in the first place.
1) I agree that more sites' content should be public in the sense that logged-out users should be able to browse. Twitter does the best job at this.
2) I only used it for a few days, very early on, but yeah it was pretty bad. I've seen much worse though.
3) I explored quite a bit, but kept finding low-quality users and content.
4) To me, the killer feature of Imzy was for people who were """triggered""" somewhere else on the internet and need a website that forces people to be cuddlebuddies and censors the living shit out of any inconvenient truths. I never actually posted on Imzy, but all the signaling there lead me to believe that that was the case for the platform.
5) Yeah, I only kept using it for those few days to see if anything/anybody cool was going to be on there, and there were a few minor headlines about it.
I am exactly 0% surprised that it's shutting down. I can't believe it made it this far to begin with, there's no way they ever made more than 5 digits, it was just an awful product with no space to exist in and no money to make from being there.
I'm on HackerNews multiple times every day. Imzy is a company that came, raised over $10MM in funding, and went out of business in 7 months. This is the first I've heard of them. How on earth does that happen? It's inexplicable.
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My theory - Reddit is kept alive by YC and YC-affiliates to keep the "hype" engine around their investments alive. In other words "remember, this is from the smart people that invested in the Frontpage of the Internet™!"
Since when is being associated with Reddit a huge signal of success, esp. compared to other sucessful startups?
Hi, I'm the founder of Imzy. It's a hard day but I want to make myself available, especially to entrepreneurs who may have questions. This last 2 years has been fun, and hard and I've learned a lot. You can reply here or email me at dan@imzy.com I also have an amazing staff of developers, community minded folks, product people, executives, who are looking for work. Many of them mare open to moving (we are in Salt Lak…
Hey Dan, I was a member in the early beta, am really sad to see Imzy go but really appreciate you guys branching off and making the efforts toward a new site (which I agree definitely still needs to exist). > We still feel that the internet deserves better and hope that we see more teams take on this challenge in the future As someone with a headful of ideas hoping to potentially take on this challenge (:P) - any wri…
If you're an engineer like me, we'll often overweight tech choices, rather than the product and user acquisition decisions that matter in a social network.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
My theory - Reddit is kept alive by YC and YC-affiliates to keep the "hype" engine around their investments alive. In other words "remember, this is from the smart people that invested in the Frontpage of the Internet™!"
Since when is being associated with Reddit a huge signal of success, esp. compared to other sucessful startups?