
Formspring is shutting down - ssclafani
http://formspring.wordpress.com/2013/03/15/formspring-is-shutting-down/
======
webwright
Would love to see a retrospective. Why didn't it succeed? What did you try?
Did you say no to early acquisition offers?

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msoad
This was my first time visiting their website. I'll not sign up for a service
when they don't show me what they have.

I like StackOverflow because they show their content, they allow you to use
their service without signing up. You will signup when you got familiar with
the service enough.

My rule of thumb is, show user the content, the value and then expect them to
sign up. A video or some nice buzz words are not enough.

~~~
eurleif
Formspring does let you see someone's questions and answers without having an
account if you go to the profile. I guess they could highlight some accounts
on the homepage, but people mostly used it to ask their friends questions, so
that wouldn't really reflect the normal use of the service.

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Mahn
Very surprising the company didn't end up acquired by a major player, I
remember it was all the rage in 2010. Good luck in your future endeavours Ade
and team.

~~~
vanessa98
Being on the other side of it, they crushed AWS services in 2010!!!

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iampims
Oh yes we did :-)

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AznHisoka
This is what happens when you don't win the "acquisition lottery" in the game
of startups. This could've easily been the fate of Instagram, or Foodspotting.

On a side note.. the most politically correct way to shutdown a service is to
let users export their data.. but I wonder if even 1 person is going to want
to do that here.

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iampims
Why wouldn’t they? Many people have dedicated hours of their time to craft
thoughtful and funny responses, I’d assume they would want to keep a record of
this.

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subsystem
I think you should contact <http://archiveteam.org>

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tzaman
I think the question here is, how could one make stats like those profitable -
with 20M unique monthly visitors, it solves some particular problem (not sure
if it's a pain, though).

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auctiontheory
Would be interesting to get a comparative retrospective on why these guys lost
while Quora seems to have come from nowhere solidly into the mainstream.

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jkaljundi
Mainstream? Isn't Quora still mostly US tech crowd. It's very little known and
used in Europe outside startup/investor community.

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propercoil
If you'd like to sell the domain to a broke student I'll pay $100 for it.
Either way, hopefully the future will shine upon you!

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iampims
You are apparently not the only one :-)

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hendzen
That's unfortunate. Some (non-teenage) people actually use it. Case in point,
I'm aware of a rabbi in NY who uses it to answer questions from his
congregants [1].

[1] - <http://www.formspring.me/rabbiblake>

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powatom
My girlfriend used Formspring a lot for the photography related posts - would
love to know if there was a simple way to scrape posts for future reference.
She was upset when I told her FS was shutting down.

Good luck for the future, FS team!

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Matsta
They couldn't be that profitable since the average of people using it was
12-13 lol.

And I'm guessing the other reason they shut down is that ask.fm took over,
pretty much took the exact same idea and now all the tween's are using that
now...

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eurleif
They lost a lot of traffic, and it started before ask.fk took over:
[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=4y&u=ask.fm&&u=formspring.me)

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unreal37
Is this really the official FormSpring blog, with only two entries?

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iampims
We `reset` the blog a few months ago. That’s why there are only a couple of
posts.

~~~
unreal37
Sorry to hear the news. I hope you and the team go on to new and greater
things.

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iampims
While it’s heartbreaking to have to shut down something you’ve poured your
heart into for many years, we have learned many things along the way that will
help us for what’s coming next. Thanks for the kind words.

~~~
mtrimpe
Can I ask how much (low/mid/high x-digits) the raw AWS hosting costs of a site
like this are?

I'd love the idea of trying to take over something like this, but I have a
suspicion I might be in way over my head...

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yogo
I still don't understand why anyone would want to use AWS unless you had money
to burn. I haven't followed the prices as of a couple years ago but I'd say
most people on here are smart enough to find cheaper solutions that can
achieve the same thing. If saving money is your goal you can make it happen--
there are providers out there with the right APIs that allow you to build
something that can scale (or adapts) at a fixed/linear cost. If you have the
money and it isn't worth your time to setup the infrastructure then AWS would
be the right decision. I just don't understand the infatuation.

~~~
iampims
The real benefits of AWS is scale on demand, if you need it.

Formspring reached 1 million users in 45 days. How do you plan for this on
typical hardware? Especially when you had no idea ANYONE would use your little
side project?

AWS isn't cheap. It offers building blocks upon which you can "easily" build
and scale a website. Not for everyone, but good enough for us.

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vizzah
Do you always have to operate expecting sudden spikes and that prevents you
from moving to a cheaper hardware? If traffic gets over what you could serve,
display 'our servers are busy' message and perhaps that way you could have
kept the service alive if costs halved..

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iampims
> Do you always have to operate expecting sudden spikes and that prevents you
> from moving to a cheaper hardware?

In short, yes. This is inherent to the nature of Formspring – or to some
extent social networks.

Since most of your actions on the site are being `broadcasted` to all your
followers, and since the distribution of followers follows a pareto
distribution, it is very difficult to predict load at any given time, as one
single action by a very popular user could trigger hundreds of millions of
events (publishing to everybody's stream, sending emails, push notifications,
updating counters, spam filtering, etc.)

We benefit greatly from the elasticity of AWS, and `scale up` accordingly to
deliver this event in a timely manner.

If we were not concerned by `delivery time`, we would be able to smooth it
out, but at the expense of engagement… and as you can imagine, engagement in a
social network is quite important :)

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alaskamiller
I remember when Formspring.me took off on Tumblr a few years back. Then Tumblr
took notice this little doodad everyone was passing around begging for
questions and cloned it. Then ask.fm just tore through with the traffic.

Oh well, great run. At least Formstack still works great.

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andrewljohnson
Poorly named co

got smashed by a Quora.

Name or app to blame?

~~~
iampims
Call me when Quora has 30 million users ;-)

But more seriously, the name Formspring originates from what Formspring used
to be, and has been renamed Formstack: <http://www.formstack.com>.

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bherms
Finally... Living in Indy and knowing several people behind this, I knew it
was doomed from day one. Social plays like this try to do nothing more than
capitalize on trends without adding any real value. They pivoted from a form
generating site to a virality play, which was never even executed well to
begin with.

...and now they shoot for a photo app. <sarcasm> Good work </sarcasm>

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eth
Seriously? 30 million users at FormSpring's peak seems to be executed
relatively well. It was no Facebook, Twitter, or Tumblr, but 30 million users
is a damn good failure as far as I'm concerned.

Now if you want to talk about social plays that capitalize on trends with
without adding any real value that are not executed especially well, then we
can talk about Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning"s travesty that is Airtime.

~~~
bherms
30 million users generating no revenue.

edit: and retention rates were abysmal. 30 million people signed up is a
vanity metric. actual "users" was a very, very small fraction of that

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chaz
I have a hard time criticizing someone for taking a ride on something that was
grew from 0 to 30 million uniques in 6 months, just to see where it goes.
You're right it wasn't super sticky and failed to drive long term utility for
users, but I think most of us here would want to take a swing at that kind of
growth and turn it into something that had long term value.

~~~
eth
Thank you for summarizing what I was really trying to say here, chaz. Even
half of YC's consumer focused tech companies should be so lucky.

The team, the direction they took the product, and the VCs/funding aside,
Ade's clearly massive effort is inspiring and should be congratulated rather
than completely drown out with sarcasm.

