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Imzy is shutting down

imzy.com

131–140 of 268 posts

Re: Imzy is shutting down

#131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TL;DR - we over built. We were too close to the problem from our experiences at reddit and built WAY too much stuff that only really matters if you are operating at scale. If we had done better with this, we could have gone to market quicker and probably done a better job finding product/market fit. There's of course more, but this is the biggest thing.

>built WAY too much stuff that only really matters if you are operating at scale. Why do people do this?? Please don't build for mega huge scales before you've gone to market...it's a huge waste of time and money. I guess developers have too much pride to not make the _best_ platform

Making a site scalable is an easy, defined problem. Building a site people want to visit, and getting them there, is much more difficult and undefined.

Re: Imzy is shutting down

#132

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.

We were actually a company just shy of 2 years.

Re: Imzy is shutting down

#133

I wish the founders well, but I feel like people nowadays give up too early. And this is one of the most extreme examples of that. Most community sites take a while to grow and you really never know what will happen. Even Reddit was sort of a failure vs. Digg and they sold it off to conde nast. It was only later AFTER the sale when Digg messed up on their own and Reddit enjoyed success as a side effect. You really sh…

> I wish the founders well, but I feel like people nowadays give up too early.

It's really difficult to offer perspective like that on something you don't really understand and haven't seen from the inside.

It's pretty clear if you don't have product-market fit as a founder. And if you don't have a really good idea of what you could do to get to product-market fit, it's entirely possible it's wise of the founders to stop and try something new, which is what I hope they plan to do now.

Much love to Dan, Jessica & the Imzy team. I know how hard this can be; best of luck on whatever comes next.

Re: Imzy is shutting down

#134
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have never seen a successful community site that raised that much money before getting traction. What are some successful community sites?

Ugh...sadly Voat. They recently ran into budget problems (they run at $6k/month) and were able to raise enough to keep running for a few months and get volunteers help move it off Azure's overpriced hosting. So there's an example of site, without much money, building off their community. It's filled with a lot of hate, racism and extremism. I still like browsing it, just to see the opinions, try to understand where o…

> without much money, building off their community. It's filled with a lot of hate, racism and extremism

Probably not helped when they get kicked off payment processors or fundraiser sites for openly hosting underage nudity, sorry, "jailbait"...

Re: Imzy is shutting down

#135

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…

I was really worried when you guys started giving out free pizza to members. Can I ask the story behind it?

Re: Imzy is shutting down

#136
post #26

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.

>a strong counterpoint against Reddit alternatives becoming an inherently successful business prospect It looks like Voat is not in good financial shape too: https://voat.co/v/announcements/1866053 https://voat.co/v/announcements/1881376

Can't help but to feel a tiny bit of schadenfreude since they locked themselves into proprietary platforms and now are desperately trying to claw themselves out of it into the warmth of open source.

Re: Imzy is shutting down

#137
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have never seen a successful community site that raised that much money before getting traction. What are some successful community sites?

Ugh...sadly Voat. They recently ran into budget problems (they run at $6k/month) and were able to raise enough to keep running for a few months and get volunteers help move it off Azure's overpriced hosting. So there's an example of site, without much money, building off their community. It's filled with a lot of hate, racism and extremism. I still like browsing it, just to see the opinions, try to understand where o…

Voat was better in the beginning but the no-rules atmosphere and underdog nature of the site attracted a lot of a$$holes too.

Re: Imzy is shutting down

#138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ugh...sadly Voat. They recently ran into budget problems (they run at $6k/month) and were able to raise enough to keep running for a few months and get volunteers help move it off Azure's overpriced hosting. So there's an example of site, without much money, building off their community. It's filled with a lot of hate, racism and extremism. I still like browsing it, just to see the opinions, try to understand where o…

> without much money, building off their community. It's filled with a lot of hate, racism and extremism Probably not helped when they get kicked off payment processors or fundraiser sites for openly hosting underage nudity, sorry, "jailbait"...

They banned all their jailbait subverses a while back. I think most services kick them off just due to the hate-speak.

Re: Imzy is shutting down

#139

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…

Could you share a brief of Imzy monthly traffic, bandwidth, and aws cost?
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