

Ask YC: Why do you think Pownce failed? - AndrewWarner

Why couldn't Pownce get enough users?<p>They had a better interface than Twitter.
They had star power &#38; geek cred via Kevin Rose.
They had an actual revenue model.
They got tons of press.
They had more features.<p>Why couldn't they get users?
======
mechanical_fish
The answer was just Twittered by Eric Meyer (<http://twitter.com/meyerweb>):

 _Of course Pownce is shutting down: it's been months now since anyone needed
a place to complain about Twitter outages._

My own analysis, now five months old, is a lot wordier:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=211870>

 _Twitter holds a huge marketing advantage -- you can't say "Site X is just
like Twitter" without saying "Twitter" -- and a big Metcalfe's Law advantage:
Everyone who is remotely interested in Twitter-like sites already has a
Twitter account, and those accounts won't magically disappear. Meanwhile,
there will be more than one Twitter competitor, all desperately trying to
distinguish themselves from each other as well as from the original._

------
callmeed
They failed because:

a) They didn't do anything new

b) They didn't let people do anything better, faster, or cheaper than they do
now

Their tag-line is "send stuff to your friends". I already use a service that
does this–it's called "email".

------
qhoxie
Acquired & Closed != Failed

Twitter just had too much momentum. Pownce got press, but nothing that came
close to competing with Twitter. Whether good or bad, people cannot and could
not stop talking about Twitter.

~~~
nir
>Acquired & Closed != Failed

If that's so, what _does_ == Failed?

I can see how this move might make sense for Pownce's people, but the product
itself certainly failed - how else can you define a situation where you're
forced to shut down your service?

~~~
qhoxie
Failure is obviously very subjective, but you spin it very poorly.

 _the product itself certainly failed - how else can you define a situation
where you're forced to shut down your service_

They were not forced, they entered into an agreement because it was favorable
to them.

~~~
eventhough
If Pownce was doing well, they wouldn't have shut it down.

~~~
qhoxie
Once again, _not doing well_ does not make it a _failure_.

~~~
trapper
google define:fail disagrees with you.

\---------

be unsuccessful

disappoint

fall short in what is expected

Failure (or flop) in general refers to the state or condition of not meeting a
desirable or intended objective

~~~
iloveyouocean
Guys, this doesn't have to be a binary decision.

There are degrees of failure and success.

~~~
trapper
Goal: beat twitter. Outcome: fail.

You can change the goal post-outcome, but it doesn't change what really
happened.

------
GHFigs
Users don't care about a better interface. Examples abound. The few that do
will love you, but even a social site cannot run on love alone.

Users don't care about star power. When I think of Kevin Rose--or rather, when
I think of Kevin Rose and am not overcome by waves of nausea--terms like "star
power" and "geek cred" do not appear in my mind. Aside from Digg users, he has
very little impact, and even among them, it's not much.

Users don't care about your revenue model. The few that do are the ones that
don't approve of it and will ditch you for it.

Users don't care how much press you get. If it's a social site, your users are
your press.

Users don't care about having more features. The few that do are a waste of
your time.

------
noodle
i'm just going to go out on a limb and say simplicity. pownce tried to solve a
lot of problems, and in doing that, lost users. or, at least, thats why i
didn't use it. if i wanted to do XYZ, i'd go do XYZ instead of using pownce's
not-quite-as-good version of it.

also, the api took forever.

~~~
apgwoz
When Pownce launched, the reasoning for it was that Facebook didn't have the
features Kevin Rose and friends wanted. But, as luck would have it, Facebook
grew up a bunch and said, "We have lots of people, and lots of money, lets
build in all of these features." Then, Pownce was (excuse the pun) pownced.

How do you get users to use Facebook, _and_ Pownce, if they already use
Facebook and there's no longer a compelling reason to use Pownce?

~~~
noodle
i was in on the beta, and even then it wasn't really far ahead of the
featureset curve.

------
payne92
Pownce wasn't different enough or better enough than Twitter for users to be
willing to give up the critical mass of users that exists on Twitter.

Plus, they were competing with a bunch of other companies trying to beat
Twitter.

How many Twitter clones do we need, really?

(Note the irony in this post: a me-too post about a me-too company)

------
foulmouthboy
Bad branding? Even before I knew what it was, I had a sense of what a Twitter
was. Pownce sounds like I'm about to get ambushed.

~~~
ojbyrne
Perhaps. My immediate thought at launch was no Brit was ever going to use it
due to the similarity of the name to "ponce."

------
strlen
Because they weren't better than Twitter at their core competency, nor did
they provide a cleaner user experience (Google and Facebook beat
Altavista/Yahoo/Myspace/Orkut/Friendster by doing exactly that).

The mp3 sharing feature? It hasn't compelled me to try pownce, there are
already music-sharing social networks (pandora and LastFM) and I can paste a
TinyURL'd link to youtube containing music or video into Twitter just fine.

As such they had no defensible technological advantage ("have a feature before
someone else" isn't). They didn't have a strong technical person, all they had
were decent web developers (Facebook's Dustin Moskowitz seems to be fairly
talented and I know they had a very strong operations team; Google had backing
of academia behind).

They could have still been a niche site and profitable, but they instead chose
to burn their money on PR (this is clearly evident) hoping to "get big fast".

------
gaius
One reason is that they faffed around with their API, they spent forever
trying to define the perfect XML and never produced anything I could build on.
I like Pownce a lot (even paid for an account for a year) but if I couldn't a)
build apps on it (not public facing) and b) find any of my friends on it it
wasn't much use to me.

~~~
babyshake
I agree. My friends didn't use it, nuff said.

In fact, this is the same reason I persist in not using Twitter. Just because
my friends tend to start and end with Facebook.

------
zerodefect
I really don't see how Pownce was in direct competition with Twitter. On the
messaging side there certainly was competition and I can see that Twitter wins
that battle, but Twitter doesn't do all the rest very well. How do I send
someone a song over Twitter? Upload it to rapidshare and send them a link,
please. I always saw these services as complementary, though I never figured
out how to perfectly balance my usage. Any thoughts on the features that
Pownce does better than Twitter? Any sites that will replace Pownce? Utterli
perhaps?

------
zealog
I'm not sure they've failed, but their lack of traction has to do with 3
things, I think.

1\. Trying to do too many things. Too many features meands market confusion
and cluttered interfaces. There is power in simplicity and purpose.

2\. Twitter had already won. The early movers and adopters were already there
and the network effect was in motion.

3\. Using Adobe Air for their non-web interface. Twitter never worked for me
until Twitterific, but air is just SLOW and annoying I personally couldn't
abide.

~~~
mikecuesta
zealog, this is the first time I've heard of anyone complaining about Air.
What would you consider as a better option? Thanks!

------
sjs382
Because (some) people are less interested in "microblogging" than "twitter as
a platform". Pownce didn't have a useful API. At least not one that I ever
found a use for...

And because people thought of it as a Twitter competitor (yes, I realize I
just did this above), where it was more of a Tumblr competitor with a worse
interface, ads, and paid subscriptions.

------
bootload
_"... Why couldn't Pownce get enough users? ..._ "

Power law observed in most naturally occurring scale-free networks means there
will be a few sites that have most users ~
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_law>

------
DaniFong
I don't think it failed, necessarily.

But if you're asking why Pownce never approached Twitter in popularity, I
think that the case is the purest expression of network effects that you can
find. That's not the whole story, of course, but it's most of it.

------
vaksel
simple really...they lacked the first mover advantage.

If you are going to do the whole twitter thing, you'll go guess where? thats
right twitter. Everyone who is anyone(if you want to call that) was using
twitter, so people just signed up for that.

And they couldn't pull a facebook/google...because twitter was doing a good
enough job for most people.

~~~
gaius
I disagree. Facebook didn't have the first-mover advantage, Friendster did.
Google didn't either, Yahoo or Altavista did. Pownce _could_ have been "the
Twitter that actually works"...

~~~
pstinnett
I think if Twitter hadn't resolved the downtime issues there could have been a
mass exodus to Pownce, but Twitter took care of what they needed to and Pownce
lost its opportunity. Even though Pownce had a lot of features that Twitter
doesn't (filesharing, etc) I never really thought of Pownce when I needed to
send a file, link, or image to friends. I always went straight to twitter and
used TinyURL or mediafire.

------
ojbyrne
Never underestimate the importance of luck. Right time, place, etc.

------
mvid
no SMS support

------
agentbleu
Pownce had a better chance than many to make it work, what with the industry
players backing it, such as Kevin and the press Leah garnered was amazing. I
think the bigger story here is that despite all the advantages that they had,
in this climate it failed.

Interestingly however DropBox has seemingly been a success which I believe
offers a more targeted solution to the problem (file transfer), rather than
trying to be all things to all people. If there is a lesson to be learned here
I would have thought it was that. Like 37signals often says, try to do one
thing really well. Don't try to offer too many features etc. and dilute your
product into yet another (I got that feature too). That seems to be the
mistake of Pownce.

