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Imzy is shutting down

imzy.com

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Re: Imzy is shutting down

#261

Post by m3rc »

betenoire wrote: post #201
m3rc wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm that's a pretty ephemeral "asset"... and it's an asset that is directly tied to your ability to pull funding. Even if you technically don't directly mold the community, it doesn't do you any favors to try and think of something else as your "product" just because you're uncomfortable with the definition.

I never said anything about what their product is. I said their users aren't a "product", they are an "asset". Value doesn't come only in the form of software. Only software devs believe that.

I definitely didn't claim that value only came in the form of software... in fact I think I claimed the opposite of that in saying that reddit calling their platform their product was useless and unhelpful. They have one thing that is attractive to users, advertisers, investors, and creators. That thing is their community. Pretending anything else is what they should try and capitalize on is silly.

Re: Imzy is shutting down

#262

Post by m3rc »

cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #211
m3rc wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? So your advice is to knowingly ignore what actually makes your site money and just call some random other feature "the product"? How would Reddit admins/CEOs ever make decisions using that advice?

If you didn't understand what he meant by the distinction between community and product, you should have asked to clarify, instead of just assuming (completely incorrectly) what he meant and arguing based on your own interpretation. Building up a community and building a product are completely different things. You can have the perfect product yet never get any community. You can get a great community without even a…

I don't dispute any of those points, but I think it's still silly to talk about anything in terms of "product" that isn't their community. Reddit the software could come and go, it's essentially irrelevant to the workings of the site (barring radical changes). Whatever you call the community of users that's still the thing you have to try and cultivate, the thing you are presenting to investors, the thing that increases your revenue.

Re: Imzy is shutting down

#263

Post by drewmeyers24 »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #92
nebabyte wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> any writeups or info on scaling/architecture would be much appreciated. There are some HighScalability articles on the bigger sites but every bit of info on comparison of architectures helps us newbies, heh. I don't think Imzy's scalabilities issue is what did them in. I signed up to see what it was about, and saw a JS bug and reported it, and they not only fixed it super-quick, but also sent me a thank-you sticker…

Building "a community" is one thing. You don't need a product to build one community. You really just need passion, credibility, and perseverance -- and some combination of a blog, email list, and facebook/slack group as the tool.

Building a bunch of communities (aka facilitating community) is a different beast entirely, and seldom takes off very quickly at all. The best example of facilitating community is Meetup.com.

I've been working on a facilitation of community model called Horizon (http://www.horizonapp.co) which is best thought of as airbnb/couchsurfing with friends, friends of friends, and communities. So, privately, rather than publicly with strangers.

You can either facilitate existing community, or build a community. Trying to do both is a recipe for disaster imho.

Re: Imzy is shutting down

#264

Post by drewmeyers24 »

oyeanuj wrote: post #68
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…

Sorry to hear that but glad you guys made the effort that you did! As another founder in a similar space, I'd love to read a post-mortem from you. And if you are in the headspace right now to maybe just share a TLDR?

What are you working on?

Re: Imzy is shutting down

#265

Post by drewmeyers24 »

buro9 wrote: post #126

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…

"Community startups are hard."

Ain't that the truth. I've got scars to prove it.

Re: Imzy is shutting down

#266

Post by drewmeyers24 »

lyra_comms wrote: post #257

If you will miss Imzy, check out Lyra - we're a nonprofit conversation service which respects language and the reader's attention. www.hellolyra.com We're also a nonprofit and don't accept ad revenue or investment, so please excuse the plug. In contrast to Imzy, we're more focussed on conversation than community-building, but this enables us to make our sharing model harrassment-proof by design.

Just checked your home page. Really no idea what the service is after 3 seconds of looking. Sadly, that's all most people are going to give you when they land on your website.

Re: Imzy is shutting down

#267

Post by henrygrew »

Imzy suffered from the big launch syndrome which always fails, instead they should have applied the proven path approach http://course.feverbee.com/the-proven-path/theprovenpath.pdf community startups are hard but success is possible with lots of patience, i run https://www.kenyatalk.com/index.php and can vouch for the proven path

Re: Imzy is shutting down

#268

Post by sigi45 »

dang wrote: post #239
sigi45 wrote: post #55

Who? What? Ah whatever

Please don't post like this here.

I would prefer a way of downvoting things like this but i can't. Instead i read it because it was posted.

Is there a relevant amount on information of going out of business, no one used and no one cared for?

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