

Formspring - A Postmortem - capwatkins
http://blog.capwatkins.com/formspring-a-postmortem

======
encoderer
I worked at Formspring for a short period a little more than a year ago, and I
left as they began to experience runway issues that were, more obviously each
day, not going to be solved by another big funding round.

The talent assembled there was very impressive. They were a small team but
full of _fantastic_ engineers.

I also learned a lot about how expensive and challenging very large EC2
deployments are (but I also know how expensive and challenging very large colo
deployments are. There's no free lunch.). I learned a lot from the Cassandra
and Redis heavy design, and I got to play with tons of fun Amazon services
(SQS, SimpleDB, etc).

I don't have the long-view of what went wrong aside from the fact that:

1) The site gained traction with young people who are fickle and eventually
left. Maybe you could say the site didn't grow up with them. A lot like
Myspace in that respect.

2) Everybody wants to answer questions about themselves, not enough people ask
good questions.

3) There is no better place to ask all my friends "Where should we get sushi
when we go to NYC next week?" and other types of Q&A, as well as the bread-
and-butter questions like "What's the last dream you remember" and "If you
were stuck on an island..." That sorta thing.

4) People always compare it to Quora, suggesting Quora is more successful.
Well, they are in that they are still funded and alive. But the DAU numbers? I
bet Formspring STILL, TODAY, weeks before shutting down, has more DAUs than
Quora

On closing, I'll share my favorite Formspring story. It was my first time
working on a popular Consumer product. When I released a feature (continuous
deployment ftw), it went to millions of users. Well, one release was memorable
to me. I think it was a redesigned Inbox or something, and immediately after
the release you'd watch your instrumentation and Twitter for any hint of
something going wrong. That was cool to me, that we have so many users of this
social product that we can use Twitter as a real-time QC feedback mechanism.
Anyway, a group of teenage friends on Twitter started discussing how they
thought the update was lame, a waste of their time, and would Formspring
please just give them something actually useful to them. Like what? One friend
asked. The other replied "You know what would be bad ass, just a big fire
breathing dragon on my inbox."

When the Founder saw these, a scheme was brewed. Through a bit of sleuthing
and some good guess work, we found the Formspring accounts for these Twitter
users. Somebody found a fire breathing dragon straight out of Ultima and a
release was whipped-up that would display this dragon on these girls
Formspring Inbox. We went from conception to release in 45 minutes. Then we
just all sat in the office and waited. Needless to say, the girls shrieked
with delight and I swear they were converted into Formspring lovers for life
after that. It was a great little easter-egg just for these few users.

Anyway, it's not that riveting of a story, but it was a great moment to be on
that team. I was new and mostly a bystander for that but it felt great to be a
part of it all.

~~~
eurleif
>I bet Formspring STILL, TODAY, weeks before shutting down, has more DAUs than
Quora

Of course, Alexa numbers require a grain of salt, but it looks like Quora's
traffic has been higher for a while:
[http://traffic.alexa.com/graph?w=400&h=220&o=f&c...](http://traffic.alexa.com/graph?w=400&h=220&o=f&c=1&y=r&b=ffffff&n=666666&r=3y&u=formspring.me&&u=quora.com)

------
itafroma
Odd that there's no mention of Tumblr's "Ask Me" (or Facebook's attempt, for
that matter).

Formspring was getting some traction on Tumblogs, got a nice write-up on
TechCrunch[1] et al, then Tumblr released their own version[2] two days later.
A few months after that, Facebook started to work on their own[3], only to
eventually kill it the end of last year.

The takeaway always seemed like Formspring was a feature (and a minor one at
that), not a product.

[1]: <http://techcrunch.com/2010/01/04/formspring-ask-me-anything/>

[2]: <http://techcrunch.com/2010/01/06/tumblr-formspring/>

[3]: [http://allfacebook.com/date/2010/04/facebook-currently-
testi...](http://allfacebook.com/date/2010/04/facebook-currently-testing-new-
questions-product/)

------
subsystem
Help archive formspring:

<http://tracker.archiveteam.org/formspring/>

[http://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=ArchiveTeam_Warri...](http://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=ArchiveTeam_Warrior)

<http://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Formspring>

------
brigade
It's kind of interesting that he thinks anonymous questions should have just
died, due to people abusing them. Whereas my experience of the site was that
e-bullies would simply sign up new accounts immediately after being banned,
since no banning occurred unless someone went out of their way to complain.

Plus, due to the media attention he alludes to, the moderation team was hyper-
sensitive so pretty much any complaint could get the account banned. So once
the trolls realized this, they started baiting normal users into posting
something slightly against the rules (or better yet combing history), then
complaining and getting the victims banned. Then, if the victim doesn't
contest the ban (you have to go out of your way to even figure out how to do
this) and instead creates new accounts, the troll just reports those for more
automatic bans.

All of this without affecting the troll, because the troll isn't using
accounts they care about, if any at all. Anonymous trolls aren't much
different than pseudonymous trolls, after all.

After a couple rounds of this, almost everyone I knew just gave up and moved
on.

------
RyanZAG
I've had this exact same experience before - you build a neat core product
that gets a decent core following, but then your team isn't sure where to go
next. The first thing that always happens is that everyone has ideas for new
features to bolt on that they've seen elsewhere.

The discussion quickly moves from 'How do we make this better?' to 'How do we
implement this feature?'. Engineering logic kicks in - this is a great
challenge! We need to show how well our design works - during the design
phase, we kept in X and Y which we can now leverage to complete this new
feature!

Once you've moved from thinking out what the customer wants to use to 'how do
I make this thing work? should I cut a corner?', then you have already lost
the customer's attention.

The article has a great take away and I agree with it completely. Don't add
features until you understand how and why the customer is going to use those
features, and most importantly, if the customer will pay (or increase
retention) for that feature.

~~~
rhizome
It sounds to me like a situation where a product is complete, and unless the
goal is creeping featurism, you might as well just lay people off and run a
smaller company.

------
dvt
As I was reading this, all I could think to myself was "wow, I would've done
the exact same thing" in almost every circumstance Formspring found themselves
in. Bottom line is: it's easy to play armchair CEO when reading a post-mortem
(and hindsight is always 20/20) but I think the fine people at Formspring
deserve a well-earned pat on the back.

They tried, they failed, and they will undoubtedly try again. As the old adage
goes, fortune favors the bold.

------
AznHisoka
"Our initial graphs at Formspring, as you probably know, all hockeysticked up
and to the right. Nearly straight up. Oh wait, the graph has peaked and is
starting to slowly (very slowly) trend downward. What do we do? Make big bets,
right? Try to recapture that crazy growth!"

Make big bets?... And then what? You had a ridiculous # of users in the
initial stages, and couldn't make a profit from that. What made you think just
getting more growth would solve all your revenue problem? ..Wait.. you were
waiting for a white knight in shining armor (ala Google/Twitter/etc) to
acquire you. Ah, I get it now.

~~~
encoderer
Bzzzzt, try again!

There were not even any real _attempts_ at monetizing early on. No ad units.
No sponsorships. It was about preserving the user experience.

And are you really criticizing them for seeking continued growth? What is
that?

~~~
AznHisoka
That's even worse. What the heck were they waiting for? 10-20 million users
not enough? we need a billion!

------
dabent
Were there any acquisition offers during that hockey-stick phase?

------
amitparikh
No mention of Ask.fm? Seemed like the European clone had been picking up a lot
of steam lately. (see [http://techcrunch.com/2012/06/27/ask-fm-claims-its-
overtaken...](http://techcrunch.com/2012/06/27/ask-fm-claims-its-overtaken-qa-
giant-formspring-whats-going-on-here/))

------
encoderer
FWIW, Cap left the company 18-24 months ago. From looking at the quantcast
information (now blacked out), it seems traffic started to fall when Facebook
changed their policy around content syndication in a users newsfeed.

~~~
jarin
Just like Zynga.

------
ronilan
It is tempting to look back and say "could have done this, should have done
that", but sometimes, maybe, there was nothing to do differently.

"Every generation throws a hero up the pop charts." -- Paul Simon

------
8ig8
Original art?

[http://blog.tetuanvalley.com/wp-
content/uploads/2011/11/thep...](http://blog.tetuanvalley.com/wp-
content/uploads/2011/11/theprocess.png)

Source:

[http://blog.tetuanvalley.com/2011/11/beware-the-trough-of-
so...](http://blog.tetuanvalley.com/2011/11/beware-the-trough-of-sorrow.html)

------
jarin
This sounds a lot like Dwolla, especially the part about designing toward your
own biases.

I don't want to say any details, but I've chatted with a few of their team
briefly and their devotion to their vision is either going to shoot them in
the foot or it's got some genius element that isn't obvious to me.

------
nwh
Don't forget that ArchiveTeam is currently busy taking a copy of Formspring
before every piece of content is removed on the shutdown date.

<http://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Formspring>

------
hopeless
I gave up reading and just did a Ctrl-F for the phrases "profit", "revenue",
"business model", and "money". 0 of 0. __That's the _f%^ &king_ problem! __

~~~
bunkat
I still don't understand why start-ups are so enamored with just having lots
of users. If you have no way to monetize them, those users just end up costing
you a lot of money. While there is always the hope of a huge acquisition
solving the problem (ala Instagram), it's sort of like spending money on
lottery tickets.

------
alexquez
Awesome write up. I'd love to know what the plan for monetization was. Was it
simply hoping you'd be acquired or did you have plans to monetize directly
from users.

------
pagekicker
News to me that anonymity was a key feature. Formspring presented itself to me
as a service for webmasters.

------
ttrreeww
Should have transformed into a dating site. Could have made millions.

