So it turns out that almost nobody wants people to check out their purchases. And also that just adding a social element to a feature isn’t enough to make it useful. The lessons of user adoption are sometimes learned the hard way.
Thus is the story of the failure of Blippy, a product that launched in private beta in December of 2009 and that we breathlessly fawned over again, and again, and again and again (andagain and again …).
“Imagine being able to see everything your friends buy with a credit card as they do it,” MG wrote. “This not only tells you what kind of things they’re actually into (rather than someone just saying they like something), but also other information like how cheap they are, as well as where they actually are at a given time.”
What we failed to ask was, “Who cares?”
Local Q&A startup Hipster has raised $1 million in seed funding from some prominent angel Valley investors including Mitch Kapor, Dave McClure/500 Startups, Lightbank, Google Ventures, Charles River Ventures, Max Ventilla, TechStars David Cohen and David Tisch, Google’s Don Dodge, Paige Craig,Ludlow Ventures, Lerer Ventures and others.
Many of you best know Hipster as the startup that launched a thousand blog posts, having insane hype and a couple of acquisition offers before its SXSW launch. While Hipster’s initial launch page had over 10,000 signups in its first few days of existence, the startup’s actual user numbers for SXSW were at just over 4,000 for the entire three day period. Were you using Hipster during SXSW? I wasn’t either.
Hipster, the oddly named local Q&A site that was up for three months in Boulder, CO, shut down in order to relaunch, went viral despite being in “stealth” a month ago, almost got bought by Google and Groupon pre-launch, didn’t end up launching at the Launch conference and so on, has revealed itself to the public today, just in time for yes, SXSW.
I’m guessing about 6 months from now, we’ll get another Blippy-esque post from TechCrunch with “No one is using Hipster after raising millions in capital. I guess we forgot to ask if anyone really cares about this site before writing seven posts about it.
My post about Hipster after SXSW:
I didn’t sign up for UseHipster until the day it was released at SXSW. I browsed for 5 minutes and never went back until today to see what’s going on with it. Most people haven’t gone back at all.
I feel sorry for the 10,000+ tweets Hipster beta users sent out in order to get “early access” to yet another startup that’s over-hyped and delivers nothing more than a copy of a copy of another startup.
Thank goodness, my all-time favorite TechCrunch writer continues to write insightful pieces like this one:
A lot of that is the fault of publications like TechCrunch: We get excited about new things. If it’s exploding like Groupon, all the better. But we even go nuts over things like Foursquare or Quora that have pretty muted user-bases. That’s what being evangelists and early adopters is all about. We tend not to write about all the apps that launch and go nowhere, with good reason: If we’re doing our job well, we probably thought they sucked to begin with.
But the bigger disservice we do is not writing enough about the boring companies who work every day to build something that becomes huge, giving the impression that starting a business is easy in the Valley. That somehow people wake up with an idea, and roll out of bed onto a pile of venture capital, press and adoration. A lot of times the companies we should be writing about more than we do are admittedly boring infrastructure or enterprise software names. But there’s a category of consumer names that should be sexy, but for whatever reason don’t get the hype.
Sarah Lacy continues to wow me with her editorial work, traveling and exposure of unknown companies. She rarely gets involved with the daily churn of huge funding rounds to unknown companies. She spends weeks on a single piece and rocks it. I may be wrong but I believe she’s the only J-School graduate employed by TechCrunch and it freaking shows! I forgive her for writing this post in 2009 about feeling sorry for journalism students. The truth is, Sarah Lacy has THE BEST posts on TechCrunch and is the best author there. She rarely speculates and always has context and quotes. This is no attack to Alexia, she just happened to be the one who wrote the Blippy and Hipster stories but I’m disappointed in TechCrunch for hyping these companies to no end, admitting they were wrong about hyping but then following up announcing the company has now raised more funding and congratulating them.
There is a fine line when it comes to hyping, admitting you were wrong but then posting about that company’s round of funding in order to prove you were right all along and that company was destined for greatness. Cut your losses, lose the ego and move on. No one should have written about Hipster again after SXSW just like no one has written about Quora for months. These companies should continue to innovate and we should let them do it without hyping them too much.
I’m not an early adopter anymore because I don’t have time to beta-test services. I’m very picky about who gets my data. I wish TechCrunch did employ real journalists. The publication would be better off.
J-School students, I salute you.