kickme444

Gilman was a huge part of my life and I played various roles in participating and helping to manage it over the year, though I don't want to take ANY credit for this, it's not my place and no person should. But, the experience I had there showed me what is possible when things are started with good intentions and managed that way going forward. There were and are rocky times at Gilman, but overall it's a model that should be studied.

Also, we made and shared a lot of great music with the world, which is the real upside of gilman. I miss that time in my life.

We were actually a company just shy of 2 years.

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

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.

Whoops, I accidentally a word. Thanks!

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

TBH we never got to the point of monetization.

To clarify, growth of users.

We were unable to find growth in any cohort.

We're in SLC and still have the majority of that money left.

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

Well, there's a lot to it and the more you use it the more you understand it. I think we need to get a lot better at getting the real value prop to new users in a better way, so thanks for highlighting this.

For now though, there's a lot written here about things that make us different - https://www.imzy.com/imzy/post/weve_raised_our_series_fundin...

Happy to answer any questions about the fundraising process.

I'm available here to answer any questions!

Happy to discuss anything here, also happy to give any and all HN users early access if you request it at https://www.imzy.com/imzy!

Crap sorry, I was offline all night being with my family and didn't see this soon enough.

In short, Imzy is attempting to find a way to align the company as best as we can with the communities. We recognize that there is no one-size-fits-all type of community and trying to fit all communities into a simple, archaic message board doesn't give the communities much to work with. Compound this with our believe that having an advertising business model not being well aligned with community's best interests, we believe that we can build a flexible commerce system into the platform so that communities can use it if and when they need it for their communities (for instance, to sell each other things, to pay for events they are putting on, to support the community leaders).

How do we do this? It's going to take a long time and require us to make our platform extendable by developers.

Right now, we are at the starting point where we have to build some initial communities and get them starting their evolution process. We have innovated a lot on our community leadership tools (and still are) and have put a very rudimentary payments platform in place. Our next phase will be to start innovating on the developer platform and the things communities are able to do on the platform.

You'll notice that nowhere in this description did I talk about free speech or harassment. That is because it isn't part of our core thesis. Our core thesis is giving communities online the attention we feel they have never been given in the right way. However, we recognize that if we are successful, we will have a lot of people on the platform and be faced with the same challenges that twitter/reddit/facebook/etc are faced with regarding harassment. So, we are focusing on it early because we feel we need to set the tone for the early communities so that as we grow they can help. There are a few things we don't allow on the site due to our past experiences: porn, hate speech, harassment, doxxing, etc.. We realize there are a lot of gray areas here and so we are equally focused on building and scaling our community team early.

That ended up being longer than I thought it was going to be, but probably not as long as it should be. I hope it gives you at least a little better idea of what we are doing.

I'm not, and I don't appreciate the accusation.

I was not a source.

I have a thesis that is basically identical to yours about unmanaged expectations and community being the main root of the problem that reddit/twitter/etc are facing, which is part of the reason why we started Imzy https://www.imzy.com/imzy

We got some press early on that really told an untrue narrative of what we are trying to do, but we've made a ton of progress in a few months of our private beta and our communities and platform are really beginning to come together. The link I gave above is to our company community and if anyone wants to try Imzy out I will approve your request as soon as you make it.

Happy to answer questions here or give people invitations. If you request an invitation to https://www.imzy.com/imzy it's much easier for me to get people in than the front page!

I said we didn't say warm and fuzzy. You don't understand that?

I have spent a good amount of my last 6 years or so trying to be happy and helping others online to be happy. What we wanted with our mascot was something that evoked happiness. Admittedly it's a fine line to walk between cute/happy/childish and we need to find the right mix.

Just to put it out there, we never said anything about warmer or fuzzier. We had no intention of having any press coverage for a few months, perhaps that was a mistake for this reason exactly.

It's true, this is the reason we are invite only right now.

It is very surreal.

It has been a very busy 8 days.

Valid concern

This is 100% not true. Yishan wanted the team to move to the same location and the board supported him. This was a question of office location, not centralizing.

No, it will not.

So happy to see this on Hacker News. Dante is so important to us and it's great to see him get some recognition.