Seesmic’s CEO: We built it, they didn’t come

http://digital.venturebeat.com/2009/06/26/video-site-seesmics-ceo-we-built-it-they-didnt-come/

by rokhayakebe • 17 years ago

33 35 17 years ago

digital.venturebeat.com

yan2• 17 years ago

Is anyone really surprised?

rokhayakebe• 17 years ago

What about the people who invested 12 million dollars in the company. How many YC round is that?

yan2• 17 years ago

I think those people were investing in mostly La Meur's name and not his company. Keep in mind, we didn't see his sales pitches, which might have been very convincing.

slpsys• 17 years ago

“I think it’s not a technology problem,” he said. “I think it’s a human problem, that there are very few people like you and me.”

While I can certainly sympathize with someone whose dream goes unfulfilled, blaming the Internet at large for not 'getting it' rather than acknowledging you were solving a problem no one apparently had is pretty haughty.

gruseom• 17 years ago

I didn't notice any blaming. I thought he was just saying that the market wasn't as big as he'd hoped.

Many successful startups originate in founders trying to solve a problem they themselves had. This may be a case where they did that, but it turned out there weren't enough other people like them.

dannyr• 17 years ago

Not surprised.

I don't know why it took them $12M to figure it out though.

gojomo2• 17 years ago

It's not clear they've spent the whole $12MM. The submission headline includes spin not in the source article.

sho2• 17 years ago

This is kind of off topic, but why do you write million as "MM"? I've noticed some people do it; is it a local-convention thing? What does the second M stand for? To me it means "millimetre" and although I can guess from context, just curious about it.

update: OK, answered my own question: It comes from Latin "Mille" meaning "thousand", so MM is a "thousand thousands". Apparently common in finance. Well, now I know!

zeedotme2• 17 years ago

its not over till its over :)

redorb• 17 years ago

after 12mm, and 2 years in the industry. Gaining only 250k uniques a month is a failure; only because im sure all the video cost a lot to put out.

sho2• 17 years ago

It's a failure all right. 250k a month is simply terrible. I know people with personal blogs who do more than that, much more in some cases.

$12m dollars, 0.25m uniques a month, 24 months. Even assuming that they've had that consistently their whole life, that's 6 million uniques, ever. $2 for each visit to their site. Time to shut down - way past time, even.

msie• 17 years ago

Seesmic "failed" because people love to comment anonymously.

quilby• 17 years ago

Keep in mind that their widget has been on every page on TechCrunch for a long time (Arrington is an investor).

They really failed :(.

vaksel2• 17 years ago

that's because the thing was useless, since the user had to go the extra mile to launch their widget.

jimboyoungblood• 17 years ago

Many companies succeed despite having no exposure on TechCrunch. This one failed despite having permanent placement on TC. Makes one wonder what the true value of TC coverage is, no?

vaksel2• 17 years ago

they did manage to raise 12mil for a crappy product with no traction

kyro• 17 years ago

This was bound to happen. I've never understood why they continued to raise money and develop the product. It's as if they didn't understand the way most people operate and behave. No one wants to watch a 1 minute video of someone expressing their opinion when I could read the same comment in text in less than 5 seconds. And I've always gotten the impression that those who do actually make video comments, who actually position their camera, look into it, and press record, are those who think their opinion matters a bit more than the rest. Most of the time, from what I've seen, people try to project some sort of personality with their comments, which is fine and all, but that usually, in my opinion, takes away from what they're actually saying. Also, Loic always tried to pull it off as video for Twitter, which is really flawed. Twitter's beauty is in the speed of the information stream. I can glance at tweets tens at a time. You don't get that with video. And I didn't quite understand their raccoon mascot and what they were trying to pull off.

brandnewlow• 17 years ago

Also, video comments just look terrible. Awful. How am I supposed to take a video comment seriously when I see some guy in his pajamas with his face scrunched up into the camera? The experience of watching these videos is thoroughly unpleasant.

quisxt• 17 years ago

It's also a lot easier to compose and edit text a text comment on the fly than a video comment.

duskwuff• 17 years ago

nod Video is fundamentally not a browseable medium. This is why video blogs never really took off, outside a relatively small and somewhat narcissistic segment: the format requires much more involvement, both on the part of the viewer and the part of the creator, and doesn't give a lot back for it.

zeedotme2• 17 years ago

I don't think it's a complete failure yet. I don't think they've spent 12 million yet either. They're adapting and guarantee they'll incorporate video into their new strategy. Their growth has stuttered sure, but they're clearly well into their new phase. Best of luck to him & the team...they've got some heavy competition.

johnnybgoode• 17 years ago

What a waste of money. Not that this is the only example.

jonknee• 17 years ago

I was never even tempted to think it would catch on. Video phones failed to catch on too--most people don't want to see or be seen when they aren't physically in the conversation.

byrneseyeview• 17 years ago

There are video phones on a couple million desktops. They usually go by the name "Macbook".

anigbrowl• 17 years ago

What problem was Seesmic purporting to solve that justin.tv, stickam, and various others weren't?

bmelton• 17 years ago

Twitter succeeded in adoption because it required less time investment than a proper blog post; Therefore, if we reduce the time investment for video... ??? Profit?

rythie• 17 years ago

Poorly edited and lit video with bad content is not better than no video at all

staunch• 17 years ago

So, are his VCs going to fire him for his honesty?

mattmaroon3• 17 years ago

Please note slide 2 of my presentations:

http://www.docstoc.com/docs/1857261/Whiner-Jerkins-All-Hands...

I told you so.

ivankirigin• 17 years ago

But Seesmic isn't dead. They've successfully pivoted, I'd say. They're growing on top of a hugely successful pair of platforms: facebook & twitter. The money they've spent in the last 6 months has certainly been better spent than all the rest, but you have to give them some credit for taking the bold move to change direction.

mattmaroon3• 17 years ago

That's true, though I'd be even less inclined to buy into their company now.

jsz0• 17 years ago

I don't really know much (anything) about this service but based on it being the "twitter of video" I would like to point out that video requires more of my attention so the content they offer would have to be dramatically better to interest me. I can read an entire page of my Twitter feed in about 10 seconds skipping the stuff I don't care about easily. I doubt I can watch 10 seconds of Seesmic and get any value out of it. Of course the other obvious problem is you can post video to Twitter by pasting a URL in. Whoever dumped $12M into this company didn't anticipate users were intelligent enough to use URLs to point to videos or assumed that any video content automatically appeals to users more than text. Either way, wrong.

Seesmic’s CEO: We built it, they didn’t come

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