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Imzy is shutting down

imzy.com

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Re: Imzy is shutting down

#161

Post by Angostura »

cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #66

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 was there from early in the beta. The thing that annoyed me, when I suggested that people should take a look at it was the decision that you had to make an account to see content. Most people visited the homepage and then said 'no'.

Re: Imzy is shutting down

#164

Post by Danihan »

stupidhn wrote: post #102

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.

"The CEO worked for reddit... therefore he passes our elitist / in-group biases! Let's throw money at him... oops"

Re: Imzy is shutting down

#165

Post by Angostura »

munificent wrote: post #25
acjohnson55 wrote: post #18

It seems perverse that I only learn about a lot of products when news of their shutdown hits HN. I'm not exactly sure I'm sure what Imzy is for, but it seems in some ways similar to a concept I had for online communities built around discussion of content. Might have been right up my alley.

> I'm not exactly sure I'm sure what Imzy is for If I recall, it got started right around the time there was a lot of shenanigans going on at Reddit around corporate drama, censorship, and the nastier subreddits. Imzy and Voat popped up to try to offer an alternative. (My impression is that Imzy was aiming for less awfulness and Voat aims for less censorship.)

It was basically aiming to be a nice, polite version of Reddit.

Re: Imzy is shutting down

#167

Post by chrshawkes »

timdeneau wrote: post #91
distantsounds wrote: post #89

nothing on the home page or "learn more" link actually shows anything about the site, just that it's yet another online community. I'm not surprised this shut down so quickly, you're giving almost no details to the user at all about how it works, what it looks like, or any sort of interactive demo. requiring someone to sign up just to see it in action is silly.

I wonder what their bounce rate was. Seems like such a strange decision to put a community behind mandatory registration… should have dropped you into some public topics instead.

How in the world did they raised 8 Million a mere 8 months ago is baffling to me

Re: Imzy is shutting down

#168

Post by santoshalper »

austenallred wrote: post #133
cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #66

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…

A community isn't a product. It is not at all clear from the inside or the outside whether a community is going to gel and take off within a year.

Communities =/= products. An entirely different kind of thinking and patience is required to grow a community as opposed to build a product.

Re: Imzy is shutting down

#169

Post by thomasz »

zapt02 wrote: post #136
r721 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Their problem isn't paying for proprietary software, their problem is that they are unable to make any money.

Re: Imzy is shutting down

#170

Post by CM30 »

cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #66

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…

Yeah, community sites are often quite slow to take off. Which is perhaps why these Reddit alternatives are not really the best thing to try and raise capital for.

I mean they could theoretically take it off sure. But communities are very rarely going to be 'rocket ship' style instant successes like more traditional service and product businesses. And given how hard they are to make profitable, or how a lot of things VCs will want in order to make them profitable will hurt the community...

Yeah, not sure this is the best kind of thing to try and build as a startup business/get venture capital for. At least not initially, before the momentum is built and the community is proven to be successful.

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