

Meeteor.com Has Shut Down - Post Mortem - philco
http://www.meeteor.com

======
raverbashing
Yes

Here's a lesson, (learned personally BTW).

When you hear '90% of startups fail', failing usually means they _wane_.

It's like flying a kite (by someone bad at it). You can run with your kite and
make it 'fly' but then you get tired and it falls to the ground. It can be a
hundred reasons, it is either a bad/defective kite, it may not be windy
enough, or you have to run faster for it to fly.

~~~
yajoe
I knew I had heard the names before (I live in Seattle), and I have nothing
but nice things to say about this team. It seems they shut down their other
venture at the same time:

<https://spokely.com/> (there is cert issure your browser will rightly
complain about)

Found it referenced on this personal brand page: <http://brandonhilkert.com/>

Best of luck to them and onwards indeed!

~~~
philco
Thanks Yajoe!

------
parfe
The write up does not address anything interesting. It doesn't even say why
the company failed. Not enough users? Not enough revenue? Failures of
technology? Not worth reading.

A thank you letter to users is not a post mortem.

~~~
philco
Thanks for the feedback. Not hoping to have to write one of these again
anytime soon - but I'll keep that in mind.

~~~
wpietri
Even if you don't publish, please do write these up for yourself.

Just sit down and fill up a document with "next time I would do Y instead of
X". You can also explain why, or what experience inspired the lesson. But
definitely write them down. Keep the document handy. Over the next few months
you'll keep having retroactive facepalm moments; you might as well get
something out of them.

Right now it feels like you will never forget the whole crazy ride. But next
time or the time after you'll read through a lessons-learned document and be
very glad you have it.

~~~
philco
Thanks for that advice. Was thinking of writing a weekly column, or a small
book about mistakes I wouldn't repeat in my next venture. Like you said, it
would make it easier to remember the lessons over time - completely agree.

------
eksith
The problem here wasn't the premise really. I mean from a premise standpoint
(when it launched) Twitter seemed pretty silly. They got over it by simply
adapting from status updates to brain dumps and then it really took off.

The problem here was planning.

No one seems to have sat down there and thought it through with: What are we
doing? How do we do it? Do we have the means? Do we have the capability? _Are
we going about this the right way?_

"The landing page didn’t work in IE. It was buggy." Did no one open up the
page in IE before launch? See what I mean about planning. It's unfortunate
because these guys seemed to have cared about their product.

    
    
      ...chef Anthony Bourdain, who wrote our epitaph in Kitchen Confidential: "The most dangerous species of owner ... is the one who gets into the business for love."
    

I lifted that from the end of this page:
[http://www.slate.com/articles/life/a_fine_whine/2005/12/bitt...](http://www.slate.com/articles/life/a_fine_whine/2005/12/bitter_brew.html)

In a way, that too is an example of poor planning.

~~~
philco
Follow up question: Could it be the exact opposite of what you're saying that
did us in? Could it be that we spent TOO much time planning, and not enough
time actually DOING (which leads to learning?)

I'll leave this here: <http://marshmallowchallenge.com/TED_Talk.html>

~~~
eksith
I saw that talk and yes, there could have been too much planning.

There's a big difference between correct planning and too much planning and I
wish I could point out the big glaring wall that divides the two. The honest
answer is that I don't know until I've walked in your shoes.

Most startups always go with : Idea > Platform > Tinkering > Launch

Between Idea and Tinkering is a feedback loop with improvements. But most
importantly, there has to be someone outside the loop to tell you when too
much planning is going on. When you're in it, you don't see it.

~~~
wpietri
I mentor at startup events and advise a few startups, and too much planning is
definitely the most common problem.

The loop you talk about is known among Lean Startup people as the build-
measure-learn loop: <http://lean.st/principles/build-measure-learn>

The folks I see doing best are the ones with a clear vision who iterate as
frequently as possible, testing their assumptions in order of risk. The right
amount of planning is the smallest amount to let them learn frequently.

------
jgrahamc
_How cool would it be if I could recommend a new friend for you to go skiing
or golfing with, based on how much overlap you had in common (Friends,
Schools, Hobbies, etc). Pretty cool, right?_

Doesn't sound cool to me. The most interesting relationships I have are the
ones where there is not a huge overlap. They are more interesting.

~~~
talisshort
Really? I lose interest with those I have nothing in common with. For me,
there is nothing quite as exhilarating like meeting someone whom you feel is
wired the same way you are, whether they are a friend or romantic partner.

I was a Meeteor user, albeit an inactive one -- I don't remember receiving
emails engaging me or asking me to come back, so I forgot about it over time.
That said, I signed up in the first place because this is indeed a pain point
for me and many others I know. At the time, I had just moved to a new city and
was having a hard time making friends (basically, I didn't have the balls to
attend classes, meetups, etc. by myself) so I saw products like Meeteor as
providing a great solution. Even now, I would love to expand my circle of
girlfriends but in an industry filled with men, it's been hard to find like-
minded females who happen to share similar interests.

------
maxmcd
There's no relation to meteor.com as far as I can tell if anyone else also
misread the title.

------
fourmii
Not trying to be douchy, but am I the only one that doesn't understand why
there are so many people trying to redefine social networking and the next big
photo sharing app?

~~~
philco
Not douchy at all - I sometimes very much feel the same way you do. The
vision, as I saw it in 2008, was this:

Social Networkin 1.0 was about connecting with people online, that you had
already met in real life. (You added a friend on Facebook, because you already
knew them).

The next evolution of Social Networking was about people discovery. IT was
about leveraging all that data we had online about ourselves, and our friend
graph, to connect with new people based on our needs. Need to connect with
someone at Amazon? Need to find a date for next week? Need a new cycling
buddy?

Chances are that your new professional contact/date/cycling partner are just a
friend away. Manufacturing the serendipity to make you connect with them is
what we envisioned.

It's really powerful if you think about it - life comes down to relationships
(and I don't mean that in a pure network-y sense).

It's also extremely monetizeable. Dating websites and LinkedIn make their
money off of being the gatekeeprs to new relationships. If you can build the
platform that is used for all of those contexts - you have the next big thing.
(And Facebook just rolled out their attempt at this, which is stumbling with
problems of identity and intent, but they'll figure it out hopefully)

~~~
rukshn
when i was reading this i got the same impression, isn't this the graph search

------
dusklight
Did you get any funding at all?

Did you make at least $1 of profit? Gross?

The "meeting people" problem is asymmetrical. You have a bunch of people who
want to meet new people. Unfortunately the type of people they want to meet
already know so many people they are not looking to meet new people. Lots of
people want to meet Katy Perry; She's probably a bit tired of people wanting
to talk to her. How did you go about addressing this issue?

------
smalter
I met Phil at a chance encounter at Think Coffee in NYC and Mark Cuban
happened to be there. In an awkward situation in which everyone was trying to
impress Cuban, Phil came off as a genuine and nice guy. Good luck to you on
the next thing.

~~~
philco
Thanks for the kind words. It was great meeting you!

That was a lot fun - don't get to do that often in your life. Learned a lot
from Mark that day, his composure and fluidity in conversation (holding court
against three overly eager entrepreneurs) was unbelievable.

------
filvdg
Some lessons learned & stats would have been nice but it looks more like a rip
post , maybe the poster has not closed the chapter yet

~~~
philco
Stats were horrible, and happy to share them (vanity metrics, and not):

8,000 Registered Users (Growth was horrible) +1M people in our database total
(after importing friends/connections)

Peak Engagement: 30% MAU 10% WAU Around 0.5% DAU (I think, this last one I'm
less sure about)

Our SXSW Service was the most successful, but still not good enough : Signed
up 3% of conference goers (As much as Glancee, Highlight signed up 5% of SXSW)
25% of our SXSW users logged in 3 or more times 20% of our users reached out
to their matches.

I'll keep thinking through what other stats I can share.

~~~
hashtree
I am absolutely enthralled with genuine analysis and numbers. All too often
when talking with startup founders, you get this fake show of "everything is
great" or them trying to sell you. Makes attempts at genuine discussion hard.

It is interesting where you get some of these genuine reflections and numbers.
You see them a lot on post mortems, but every now and then you will hit up a
meetup or conference where it happens. Example: Attended the conference of
world affairs at CU Boulder last year. It was the end of the day in a
relatively empty auditorium. Both Tom Preston-Werner and Eric Wilhelm were
giving some great insight into early business operations successes/failures.

------
desireco42
I thought it was Meteor and was scared for a moment. Whew!

Sorry founder(s) but no-one apparently cared much about your site. It happens
to the best of us.

~~~
ddon
Exactly what I got scared of :)

------
article23
When working on new concepts of human interactions, may be we need to rely
more on social science than technology. Having a ton of information on people,
may not be enough to predict with whom they want to hangout. I wonder if big
companies like Google and Facebook, used focus group and social science before
launching g+ and “Graph Search”. I hope they did.

------
solarflair
Never heard of it.

~~~
silentmars
That's a pretty good post-mortem for any startup.

~~~
philco
Hold on, let me get us some nails and a hammer. We'll get this coffin shut
tight if we work together

~~~
whyleyc
Philip - well done for retaining a sense of humour in the face of such
outstandingly helpful feedback from the HN armchair critic brigade.

Stay foolish :)

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Vinnix
I think branding an idea as '2.0' was your first mistake. Pretty much meeteor
was ambitious to innovate a new feature to social networking, but since that
ideology is more in my opinion a 'soft' science, I think funding would have
been difficult to make it sustainable.

------
JimWillTri
You guys definitely gave it a good run. What are your plans now?

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robodale
They didn't solve a pain I either knew or did not know I had.

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arrowgunz
I am surprised they lasted this long.

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whileonebegin
Did you make any money at all?

~~~
philco
Nope.

