Formspring is shutting down

http://formspring.wordpress.com/2013/03/15/formspring-is-shutting-down/

by ssclafani • 13 years ago

98 47 13 years ago

formspring.wordpress.com

unreal372• 13 years ago

Is this really the official FormSpring blog, with only two entries?

teej• 13 years ago

Yes, it's linked at the top of http://www.formspring.me/formspring with the message "Important Formspring News"

iampims12• 13 years ago

We `reset` the blog a few months ago. That’s why there are only a couple of posts.

unreal372• 13 years ago

Sorry to hear the news. I hope you and the team go on to new and greater things.

Mahn• 13 years ago

Very surprising the company didn't end up acquired by a major player, I remember it was all the rage in 2010. Good luck in your future endeavours Ade and team.

vanessa98• 13 years ago

Being on the other side of it, they crushed AWS services in 2010!!!

iampims12• 13 years ago

Oh yes we did :-)

bherms2• 13 years ago

Finally... Living in Indy and knowing several people behind this, I knew it was doomed from day one. Social plays like this try to do nothing more than capitalize on trends without adding any real value. They pivoted from a form generating site to a virality play, which was never even executed well to begin with.

...and now they shoot for a photo app. <sarcasm> Good work </sarcasm>

eth2• 13 years ago

Seriously? 30 million users at FormSpring's peak seems to be executed relatively well. It was no Facebook, Twitter, or Tumblr, but 30 million users is a damn good failure as far as I'm concerned.

Now if you want to talk about social plays that capitalize on trends with without adding any real value that are not executed especially well, then we can talk about Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning"s travesty that is Airtime.

bherms2• 13 years ago

30 million users generating no revenue.

edit: and retention rates were abysmal. 30 million people signed up is a vanity metric. actual "users" was a very, very small fraction of that

krapp• 13 years ago

I thought it was pretty interesting while it stuck to the "ask me anything" gimmick. I liked that idea, and I liked that you could get anonymous questions. But then I started seeing social details getting added that made me suspect they wanted more to be like Facebook than to be, you know, the unique presence they actually were. Not that I could blame them, but if I wanted facebook, you know, I'd go to facebook. So Formspring basically turned into an awkward imageboard/microblogging app. And then one day it was impossible for me to even log in. Except through the facebook app, from which I disabled my account (because AFAIK they're one of those sites which believes it should be impossible to actually delete your account) and never looked back.

mixmax• 13 years ago

You know what commands respect in my book? Actually doing something. Doing a startup is hard, getting as many users as formspring is even harder.

You know what doesn't command respect? Being an armchair quarterback snarking that they should have done more.

webwright• 13 years ago

Would love to see a retrospective. Why didn't it succeed? What did you try? Did you say no to early acquisition offers?

msoad• 13 years ago

This was my first time visiting their website. I'll not sign up for a service when they don't show me what they have.

I like StackOverflow because they show their content, they allow you to use their service without signing up. You will signup when you got familiar with the service enough.

My rule of thumb is, show user the content, the value and then expect them to sign up. A video or some nice buzz words are not enough.

rattray• 13 years ago

I understand your frustration but I'm not sure it's relevant here. Formspring's issue certainly wasn't lack of signups; they claimed over 30 million.

eurleif2• 13 years ago

Formspring does let you see someone's questions and answers without having an account if you go to the profile. I guess they could highlight some accounts on the homepage, but people mostly used it to ask their friends questions, so that wouldn't really reflect the normal use of the service.

iampims12• 13 years ago

Yeah, you can check out everybody’s profile without signing up: http://www.formspring.me/pims and you can see every public thread. And until very recently, you could even ask questions without being a registered user to the users who had this feature enabled.

The only “private” features you don’t see when not registered are your stream (similar to your Twitter timeline) and your inbox (similar to your FB messages).

raverbashing• 13 years ago

My guess: it was an experiment, with a limited expiry date

It's one of those things that, after the initial novelty factor passed, has limited usage.

Some have managed to find a use for it (like answering consumer questions for certain brands) but it was limited tool.

revorad• 13 years ago

It's sad Formspring had to shutdown. But this must be a tough business to be in. They had millions of monthly active users, and yet couldn't pull it off as a business.

This is why I find Entertainment vs Productivity to be a much better way of thinking about startups than B2C vs B2B. When you're in the Entertainment business, you're competing with everyone. Getting successful is a lot about staying in vogue for a long long time.

And even then, someone well-established like Facebook is constantly threatened by little upstarts like Snapchat and Whatsapp.

In the productivity market, you compete a lot more on product (see Evernote, Dropbox). It's not as easy to get early traction, but once you get it, it's a lot more defensible too.

Some stats from Formspring's site (2011-2012) -

Web Stats:

• 365M page views per month • 20M unique global monthly visitors • 4.5M US unique monthly visitors • 28M global registered users • 8.6M US registered users • 3M monthly active users • Avg. 4.5 pages/10 mins. per session • Avg. 8K questions per minute • Avg. 2.5M responses per day • 4B+ responses to date • 60% connected to other social media • Avg. 50+ followers per user

Mobile iOS Stats •Nearly 500K downloads •55M page views per month •250K unique monthly visitors •Avg. 12.5 pages per app session •Avg. 1 hour+ per app session Site Stats & Demographics •54% Female 46% Male (Global) •96% in the 13-34 age group •28M global registered users •4B responses to date •60% connected to other social media •Avg. 30 followers per user

http://cdn.formspring.me/images/about/downloads/Formspring-B...

Matsta• 13 years ago

They couldn't be that profitable since the average of people using it was 12-13 lol.

And I'm guessing the other reason they shut down is that ask.fm took over, pretty much took the exact same idea and now all the tween's are using that now...

eurleif2• 13 years ago

They lost a lot of traffic, and it started before ask.fk took over: http://traffic.alexa.com/graph?w=400&h=220&o=f&c...

AznHisoka• 13 years ago

This is what happens when you don't win the "acquisition lottery" in the game of startups. This could've easily been the fate of Instagram, or Foodspotting.

On a side note.. the most politically correct way to shutdown a service is to let users export their data.. but I wonder if even 1 person is going to want to do that here.

iampims12• 13 years ago

Why wouldn’t they? Many people have dedicated hours of their time to craft thoughtful and funny responses, I’d assume they would want to keep a record of this.

subsystem• 13 years ago

I think you should contact http://archiveteam.org

auctiontheory• 13 years ago

Would be interesting to get a comparative retrospective on why these guys lost while Quora seems to have come from nowhere solidly into the mainstream.

jkaljundi• 13 years ago

Mainstream? Isn't Quora still mostly US tech crowd. It's very little known and used in Europe outside startup/investor community.

andrewljohnson• 13 years ago

Poorly named co

got smashed by a Quora.

Name or app to blame?

iampims12• 13 years ago

Call me when Quora has 30 million users ;-)

But more seriously, the name Formspring originates from what Formspring used to be, and has been renamed Formstack: http://www.formstack.com.

propercoil• 13 years ago

If you'd like to sell the domain to a broke student I'll pay $100 for it. Either way, hopefully the future will shine upon you!

iampims12• 13 years ago

You are apparently not the only one :-)

hendzen• 13 years ago

That's unfortunate. Some (non-teenage) people actually use it. Case in point, I'm aware of a rabbi in NY who uses it to answer questions from his congregants [1].

[1] http://www.formspring.me/rabbiblake

alaskamiller• 13 years ago

I remember when Formspring.me took off on Tumblr a few years back. Then Tumblr took notice this little doodad everyone was passing around begging for questions and cloned it. Then ask.fm just tore through with the traffic.

Oh well, great run. At least Formstack still works great.

tzaman• 13 years ago

I think the question here is, how could one make stats like those profitable - with 20M unique monthly visitors, it solves some particular problem (not sure if it's a pain, though).

powatom• 13 years ago

My girlfriend used Formspring a lot for the photography related posts - would love to know if there was a simple way to scrape posts for future reference. She was upset when I told her FS was shutting down.

Good luck for the future, FS team!

Formspring is shutting down

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