Ask YC: Why do you think Pownce failed?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=382115

by AndrewWarner • 18 years ago

19 42 18 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Why couldn't Pownce get enough users?

They had a better interface than Twitter. They had star power & geek cred via Kevin Rose. They had an actual revenue model. They got tons of press. They had more features.

Why couldn't they get users?

noodle3• 18 years ago

i'm just going to go out on a limb and say simplicity. pownce tried to solve a lot of problems, and in doing that, lost users. or, at least, thats why i didn't use it. if i wanted to do XYZ, i'd go do XYZ instead of using pownce's not-quite-as-good version of it.

also, the api took forever.

apgwoz• 18 years ago

When Pownce launched, the reasoning for it was that Facebook didn't have the features Kevin Rose and friends wanted. But, as luck would have it, Facebook grew up a bunch and said, "We have lots of people, and lots of money, lets build in all of these features." Then, Pownce was (excuse the pun) pownced.

How do you get users to use Facebook, and Pownce, if they already use Facebook and there's no longer a compelling reason to use Pownce?

noodle3• 18 years ago

i was in on the beta, and even then it wasn't really far ahead of the featureset curve.

smoody• 18 years ago

totally agree. there's power in a singular purpose. sometimes with singular purpose, one runs the risk of being branded a feature and not a company. but, other times, a twitter emerges.

gaius2• 18 years ago

One reason is that they faffed around with their API, they spent forever trying to define the perfect XML and never produced anything I could build on. I like Pownce a lot (even paid for an account for a year) but if I couldn't a) build apps on it (not public facing) and b) find any of my friends on it it wasn't much use to me.

babyshake• 18 years ago

I agree. My friends didn't use it, nuff said.

In fact, this is the same reason I persist in not using Twitter. Just because my friends tend to start and end with Facebook.

qhoxie3• 18 years ago

Acquired & Closed != Failed

Twitter just had too much momentum. Pownce got press, but nothing that came close to competing with Twitter. Whether good or bad, people cannot and could not stop talking about Twitter.

noodle3• 18 years ago

this. was going to edit my comment to include this, but you beat me to it :)

Brushfire• 18 years ago

+1. This is not a failure. Granted, I dont know what their total investment was, and whether they got any $$ from Six Apart to cover that investment, but personally for those two this will probably end up more in the success columns.

Tried something awesome against entrenched competitors. Made progress, and accomplished a lot. It didnt work out, but they got some sort of payout and immediate jobs! For the founders this is a lukewarm win, but still a win, I would think.

AndrewWarner3• 18 years ago

For an entrepreneur, building something this visible is a success. It'll build their reputation.

volida• 18 years ago

You see this is what a lot of people get wrong. You think Pownce or X didn't grow because of Twitter or Y? This is a very wrong assumption assuming the world has 1600 million internet users.

nir• 18 years ago

>Acquired & Closed != Failed

If that's so, what does == Failed?

I can see how this move might make sense for Pownce's people, but the product itself certainly failed - how else can you define a situation where you're forced to shut down your service?

qhoxie3• 18 years ago

Failure is obviously very subjective, but you spin it very poorly.

the product itself certainly failed - how else can you define a situation where you're forced to shut down your service

They were not forced, they entered into an agreement because it was favorable to them.

callmeed2• 18 years ago

I disagree. Pownce the app did fail. I'm not seeing anyone online calling this an "acquisition". Even on the Pownce blog, Leah says "We will be closing the service and Mike and I, along with the Pownce technology, have joined Six Apart".

Yes, maybe they got a small chunk for the IP, and maybe they will start something else down the road ... but Pownce failed and they have to work for someone else now.

vaksel2• 18 years ago

simple really...they lacked the first mover advantage.

If you are going to do the whole twitter thing, you'll go guess where? thats right twitter. Everyone who is anyone(if you want to call that) was using twitter, so people just signed up for that.

And they couldn't pull a facebook/google...because twitter was doing a good enough job for most people.

gaius2• 18 years ago

I disagree. Facebook didn't have the first-mover advantage, Friendster did. Google didn't either, Yahoo or Altavista did. Pownce could have been "the Twitter that actually works"...

pstinnett• 18 years ago

I think if Twitter hadn't resolved the downtime issues there could have been a mass exodus to Pownce, but Twitter took care of what they needed to and Pownce lost its opportunity. Even though Pownce had a lot of features that Twitter doesn't (filesharing, etc) I never really thought of Pownce when I needed to send a file, link, or image to friends. I always went straight to twitter and used TinyURL or mediafire.

vaksel2• 18 years ago

first mover advantage doesn't matter if the first mover product sucks, this is why Google and Facebook were able to get ahead.

But Twitter didn't suck enough for Pownce to be able to get that core segment of new users who are annoyed and frustrated with the competitor.

foulmouthboy• 18 years ago

Bad branding? Even before I knew what it was, I had a sense of what a Twitter was. Pownce sounds like I'm about to get ambushed.

ojbyrne2• 18 years ago

Perhaps. My immediate thought at launch was no Brit was ever going to use it due to the similarity of the name to "ponce."

mvid• 18 years ago

no SMS support

mechanical_fish• 18 years ago

The answer was just Twittered by Eric Meyer (http://twitter.com/meyerweb):

Of course Pownce is shutting down: it's been months now since anyone needed a place to complain about Twitter outages.

My own analysis, now five months old, is a lot wordier:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=211870

Twitter holds a huge marketing advantage -- you can't say "Site X is just like Twitter" without saying "Twitter" -- and a big Metcalfe's Law advantage: Everyone who is remotely interested in Twitter-like sites already has a Twitter account, and those accounts won't magically disappear. Meanwhile, there will be more than one Twitter competitor, all desperately trying to distinguish themselves from each other as well as from the original.

zealog• 18 years ago

I'm not sure they've failed, but their lack of traction has to do with 3 things, I think.

1. Trying to do too many things. Too many features meands market confusion and cluttered interfaces. There is power in simplicity and purpose.

2. Twitter had already won. The early movers and adopters were already there and the network effect was in motion.

3. Using Adobe Air for their non-web interface. Twitter never worked for me until Twitterific, but air is just SLOW and annoying I personally couldn't abide.

mikecuesta• 18 years ago

zealog, this is the first time I've heard of anyone complaining about Air. What would you consider as a better option? Thanks!

callmeed2• 18 years ago

They failed because:

a) They didn't do anything new

b) They didn't let people do anything better, faster, or cheaper than they do now

Their tag-line is "send stuff to your friends". I already use a service that does this–it's called "email".

bootload• 18 years ago

"... Why couldn't Pownce get enough users? ..."

Power law observed in most naturally occurring scale-free networks means there will be a few sites that have most users ~ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_law

strlen• 18 years ago

Because they weren't better than Twitter at their core competency, nor did they provide a cleaner user experience (Google and Facebook beat Altavista/Yahoo/Myspace/Orkut/Friendster by doing exactly that).

The mp3 sharing feature? It hasn't compelled me to try pownce, there are already music-sharing social networks (pandora and LastFM) and I can paste a TinyURL'd link to youtube containing music or video into Twitter just fine.

As such they had no defensible technological advantage ("have a feature before someone else" isn't). They didn't have a strong technical person, all they had were decent web developers (Facebook's Dustin Moskowitz seems to be fairly talented and I know they had a very strong operations team; Google had backing of academia behind).

They could have still been a niche site and profitable, but they instead chose to burn their money on PR (this is clearly evident) hoping to "get big fast".

payne92• 18 years ago

Pownce wasn't different enough or better enough than Twitter for users to be willing to give up the critical mass of users that exists on Twitter.

Plus, they were competing with a bunch of other companies trying to beat Twitter.

How many Twitter clones do we need, really?

(Note the irony in this post: a me-too post about a me-too company)

DaniFong• 18 years ago

I don't think it failed, necessarily.

But if you're asking why Pownce never approached Twitter in popularity, I think that the case is the purest expression of network effects that you can find. That's not the whole story, of course, but it's most of it.

sjs382• 18 years ago

Because (some) people are less interested in "microblogging" than "twitter as a platform". Pownce didn't have a useful API. At least not one that I ever found a use for...

And because people thought of it as a Twitter competitor (yes, I realize I just did this above), where it was more of a Tumblr competitor with a worse interface, ads, and paid subscriptions.

GHFigs• 18 years ago

Users don't care about a better interface. Examples abound. The few that do will love you, but even a social site cannot run on love alone.

Users don't care about star power. When I think of Kevin Rose--or rather, when I think of Kevin Rose and am not overcome by waves of nausea--terms like "star power" and "geek cred" do not appear in my mind. Aside from Digg users, he has very little impact, and even among them, it's not much.

Users don't care about your revenue model. The few that do are the ones that don't approve of it and will ditch you for it.

Users don't care how much press you get. If it's a social site, your users are your press.

Users don't care about having more features. The few that do are a waste of your time.

ojbyrne2• 18 years ago

Never underestimate the importance of luck. Right time, place, etc.

agentbleu• 18 years ago

Pownce had a better chance than many to make it work, what with the industry players backing it, such as Kevin and the press Leah garnered was amazing. I think the bigger story here is that despite all the advantages that they had, in this climate it failed.

Interestingly however DropBox has seemingly been a success which I believe offers a more targeted solution to the problem (file transfer), rather than trying to be all things to all people. If there is a lesson to be learned here I would have thought it was that. Like 37signals often says, try to do one thing really well. Don't try to offer too many features etc. and dilute your product into yet another (I got that feature too). That seems to be the mistake of Pownce.

zerodefect• 18 years ago

I really don't see how Pownce was in direct competition with Twitter. On the messaging side there certainly was competition and I can see that Twitter wins that battle, but Twitter doesn't do all the rest very well. How do I send someone a song over Twitter? Upload it to rapidshare and send them a link, please. I always saw these services as complementary, though I never figured out how to perfectly balance my usage. Any thoughts on the features that Pownce does better than Twitter? Any sites that will replace Pownce? Utterli perhaps?

Ask YC: Why do you think Pownce failed?

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