[kickme444]

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 [e-mail]

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 Lake City) and all are open to remote work. They are all very talented. Please drop me a line if you're interested.

[rsync]

"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 [e-mail]"

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 was produced on your platform ?

[kickme444]

No I hadn't considered this, thanks for the suggestion.

[toomuchtodo]

Thanks for doing this. Saves Archive Team time having to grab the site before it goes dark.

[ThisIsUnfair]

Will you open source your code after you shut down?

[nebabyte]

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 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.

Also, as others asked about - if you guys do manage to open source, that could be a starting point for those who liked Imzy's layout/model (personally as one of the ones who likes aspects of "oldschool" and novel design concepts, I'd go in a diff direction; but the engine could still help me figure out components needed and possibly other scaling/metrics/etc logic)

Thanks for giving it a shot, take care man.

[pavel_lishin]

> 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. So their team, while imperfect as all teams are, was at least responsive and dedicated.

If I had to guess - and I do - their problems stemmed from their community size not growing as rapidly as it could have, and monetization.

That's the interesting thing - how do you build a community? How do you build a bunch of communities? How do you advertise, how do you tackle moderation successfully, how do you keep people invested, etc.

There's a billion write-ups on writing code, but nowhere near enough on running a meta-community.

[drewmeyers24]

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.

[nemild]

I'll give you one piece of advice: beware premature scaling. If you have a headful of ideas, I'd focus on building something people want, not thinking about scale or other technical optimizations.

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.

[jboogie77]

Do you plan on open sourcing any part of the site?

[djsumdog]

I really hope they do. It may not be up to them and more up to their investors, but having a platform like this that people in the open source community can hack on may provide new great things further down the line.

[alexquez]

Sorry to hear you're shutting down. I know it's a terrible experience, but thank you for being open.

Can you explain a bit about how you tried to monetize the site? What did you try? What worked and what didn't?

[kickme444]

TBH we never got to the point of monetization.

[cookiecaper]

Uh... you mean never got to the point of monetization, right?

[kickme444]

Whoops, I accidentally a word. Thanks!

[reiichiroh]

all those free t-shirts did you in :(

[weewooweewoo]

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

[Elect2]

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

[Guest98123]

It looks like their traffic has been fairly flat. I'd guess just over 1,000 unique users a day based on their Alexa rating, and a number of sites I run for comparison numbers. At the peak of their popularity, it would have been closer to 2,000 unique users a day.

It's incredibly small for the amount of media attention they received. I think shutting down is the right, and responsible move here.

[oyeanuj]

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?

[drewmeyers24]

What are you working on?

[dennisgorelik]

What did happen with $11M in funding Imzy received?

https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/imzy

[wehadfun]

Why did you shut it down?

[kickme444]

We were unable to find growth in any cohort.

[Angostura]

Do you consider letting people actually see the site without login - it was a massive barrier to interest imho

[wtvanhest]

Sorry to hear about your experience. I had the pain of shutting down my business a few years ago. It completely sucks, but it is also a relief.

Did you focus on any cohort or did you just experiment with lots of cohorts hoping one would take off? If you did focus, what if anything did you learn?

[kickme444]

To clarify, growth of users.

[geofft]

Why did you need to find this? Was this a pressure from investors, or did you determine internally that growth wouldn't eventually take off, ever?

(One of the things that worries me a lot about taking venture capital is the pressure to grow quickly over growing well / sustainably, so I'm pretty curious about this....)

[nebabyte]

Practically any monetization effort is a function of the number of users - a percent of users paying is still a percent.

If they're not seeing the demand it's smarter to cut losses than to continue on without a plan to make the site sustainable.

[wehadfun]

Growth as in $$$ or visitors of the site

[aakriti1215]

Can you talk on the challenges and strategies of creating a community of people like Imzy? Not necessarily just online, but also in real life, how do you bring people together?

[Super_Jambo]

Sorry to hear about this although it's the first I've heard of Imzy.

Bit curious if there was any weighting algorithm in the voting?

[kickme444]

No, there wasn't. We never had enough volume to worry about that.

[sprt]

What would you have done differently?

[kickme444]

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.

[pitaa]

I admire your openness about this. I never used Imzy, but I definitely saw the appeal. Its unfortunate things didn't work out. I'm curious; Knowing what you know now, do you think you could have made it work? Basically, how much of a difference would getting to market quicker have made?

[joeberon]

>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

[wpietri]

TL;DR: They do it because they haven't yet learned the skills needed not to.

People doing startups are natural optimists, bold risk-takers. And to get the money, you have to sell people on a dream of giant scale, on a big vision of what is to come. If you can't create and sell that vision, nobody gives you the money.

To then turn around and say, "Ok, what's the minimum necessary?" is really hard. You have to throw out 99% of your vision. You have to turn into a risk-averse pessimist. After talking about making the best thing, you have to go and make nearly the worst thing. Then you user-test it, discover why it sucks for your core audience, and make it suck less, in hopes that this time you've got the minimum viable product.

Making that turn is definitely a skill, something you have to learn and practice. It's not something we learn at all just building things to spec, which is the normal experience. It's the kind of product management that in theory everybody should do, but that in practice you only really are forced to do if you don't have much money.

[nickstefan12]

> Then you user-test it, discover why it sucks for your core audience, and make it suck less, in hopes that this time you've got the minimum viable product.

Seems related to: "MVP" --> "the rewrite / second system"

[Macha]

I can see why they would if they had previous been involved in Reddit. The only site that had more notorious problems scaling in its early-middle days that I can think of is Twitter with its fail whale.

[VectorLock]

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.

[dredmorbius]

I'm looking forward to your post mortem.