Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Imzy is shutting down

imzy.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 268 posts

Re: Imzy is shutting down

#121

Post by djsumdog »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #90
minimaxir wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Voat never raised millions in venture capital, though. (and can't given their content/userbase)

They will probably have a hard time raising from institutional investors, but my guess is their userbase is primarily single men who spend large amounts of time on the computer, a decent subset of whom have spending cash. The "goats" are also people who feel like they've been politically badgered into a corner, so I suspect they will spend to maintain their last refuge. Your will to fight goes up as the space you are…

> primarily single men

I was at this event with a close friend of mine and noticed the distinctive Voat logo on her phone.

"Are you .. are browsing Voat?"

I'd classify her as libertarian-esque.

I know it's just one datapoint, but I don't think the voat userbase is as 1-dimensional is you think.

Re: Imzy is shutting down

#122

Post by [deleted] »

minimaxir wrote: post #2

Wait, what? They raised a $8M Series A less than a year ago! https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/26/imzy-raises-8-million-seri... That was also the time it was opened to the public. This shutdown appears to be a strong counterpoint against Reddit alternatives becoming an inherently successful business prospect.

[deleted]

Re: Imzy is shutting down

#124

Post by killin_dan »

nostrademons wrote: post #117
killin_dan wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit spammed fake comments for months in order to gain traction... https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/how-reddit-got-hu... (I'm not proposing Vice as a great source, but it's the first thing that came up on google.)

I first checked them out the day they opened (July 05), and was using them daily by January 06. There were definitely real people and a growing community by then. I wouldn't attribute their success to fake accounts, although the fake accounts were probably necessary to seed the community. Rather, they took off once they added comments (Dec 05, IIRC). It's the same story as Whatsapp (messaging), YouTube (related video…

Steve Huffman himself attributes early success to the spam campaign.

Re: Imzy is shutting down

#125

Post by dageshi »

killin_dan wrote: post #100
jmcgough wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit took off within months of its launch. ~30 days to download data is pretty standard.

Reddit spammed fake comments for months in order to gain traction... https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/how-reddit-got-hu... (I'm not proposing Vice as a great source, but it's the first thing that came up on google.)

Reddit gained traction because its frontpage was accessible to everyone (no signup) and it updated more frequently than Digg. The stuff you read on reddit turned up on Digg later and slashdot days later. Eventually you stopped going to Digg because you'd read everything already on reddit.

Re: Imzy is shutting down

#126

Post by buro9 »

I worked on https://microco.sm with mattrco and it was forum/community software too. It looks like https://www.lfgss.com/

The #1 problem with a community startup: Every community is itself a startup.

The revenue math and compounded growth all makes sense, but you need to assume that few of your communities survive, and that they each take as long as a startup to get traction and grow.

If it takes you 1 year to get an MVP of sufficient quality to start attracting communities, it's still going to take the community at least a year to have sufficient attractiveness to bring in members. And it's unlikely that either will take as short as a year, and if it did that isn't going to be enough to bring in another round of funds to keep going.

Community startups are hard.

Re: Imzy is shutting down

#127

Post by bdcravens »

mbesto wrote: post #88
TylerE wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a propaganda success, not a business success. Reddit has always lost money, and continues to lose money quarter after quarter.

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™!"

Keep in mind that Reddit was pretty much PG's idea, not the founders'.

Re: Imzy is shutting down

#130

Post by kickme444 »

rsync wrote: post #112
kickme444 wrote: post #3

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…

"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" Have you considered contacting Internet Archive - or specifically, "Archive Team" - and coordinating with them to package up and deliver an archive of the public data that…

No I hadn't considered this, thanks for the suggestion.
Post reply on HN