12 ms·
Six Apart acquires and shuts down Pownce
- deleted 18y ago[deleted]
- azharcs 18y agooh, there goes another twitter-killer.
- jonknee 18y agoLet's hope it wasn't for the programming talent... http://leahculver.com/2008/11/25/couchdb-documents-python-objects/ http://leahculver.com/2008/11/25/couchdb-documents-python-ob... http://leahculver.com/2007/04/19/star-ratings/ http://leahculver.com/2007/04/19/star-ratings/
- utnick 18y agoUm, These 2 blog posts really aren't bad. So she isn't the next guido van rossum, but if any of us ( maybe even guido ) posted our thoughts, code examples, and solutions on a blog there would be many examples of less than ideal or poor code.
- crabapple 18y agoblogsalot != knowsalot
- jonursenbach 18y agoYeah aside from the programming "talent", I'm quite perplexed as to the reason of this acquisition. Last I checked, Pownce wasn't competing with any SixApart services.
- unalone 18y agoI have some sympathy towards Leah, because I'm not an experienced coder myself, and I'm also working on a start-up. While I thought Pownce was useless and never used it myself, it was a good-looking product and it had a nice layout. Six Apart would do well to learn from the Pownce team about making a pretty product.
- ojbyrne 18y agoI think that "good-looking" and nice layout were both courtesy of Daniel Burka, and he's not going to SA.
- crabapple 18y agoI'm not an experienced coder myself, and I'm also working on a start-up. stop wasting the precious hours of your life
- unalone 18y ago"Wasting?" I have a brilliant idea, I'm good with visuals, and I've got a cofounder. And I can't think of anything else I'd want to spend my freshman year on.
- crabapple 18y agoand I've got a cofounder good god please bury this term, the yc fanboys have turned the "startup" lexicon into such a shallow cliche that its almost at the point of parody. you don't have a "cofounder", what you have is a guy down the hall in your dorm I can't think of anything else I'd want to spend my freshman year on. try your homework, it'll pay dividends unlike yet-another pointless website
- 18y ago
- kirse 18y agoOuch, what a burn. Just curious, what companies have you built and sold? I tried to check your profile but it was empty.
- jrnkntl 18y agoThat's just lousy. Can't someone say the soup tastes like shit in some restaurant when all he can do in the kitchen himself is boil some water?
- cglee 18y agoyes they can, but then they'd open themselves up to criticism...not sure what's 'fair game' here, but seems to me like complaining/criticizing others is indirectly saying "I can do better". Prove it.
- petercooper 18y agoVery few games reviewers can develop games. Very few people who review music are successful musicians. Reviewers - except when on industry-formed panels - are rarely any good at producing what they're reviewing.. that's why they're reviewers.
- cglee 18y agoHis wasn't a review; it was a personal dig towards specific programmer's ability. Even professional critics usually have to make a sound argument, not just point to blunders on a blog.
- petercooper 18y agoIt was a cheap shot and an unfair dig, but ultimately I still believe you don't necessarily need to be skilled in something to be able to criticize its proponents whether you're tactful or not. In as much as it was a criticism, it was a review of sorts. Democracy relies on this concept of making crude judgements. The "Bush sucks" and "Liberals are socialists" nonsense is crass and often wrong, but people do think that way when voting. If we had to understand politics, economics, and government to a truly informed level, turnout would be in the single digit percentages ;-) Thankfully, he got voted down to oblivion - so it seems like the majority believe it was a cheap shot and not worth paying attention to. Doesn't mean he was any less qualified to express the opinion though.
- deleted 18y ago[deleted]
- pxlpshr 18y agoYou're right, it was for the get-it-done talent that so few people actually have... developers are a dime a dozen. Stop glorifying yourself.
- allenbrunson 18y agookay, i'm going to take the unpopular opinion here (based on the karma votes i see in this thread), and say that those two linked blog entries show a profound lack of programming ability. since when is it wrong to expect a programmer to be good at programming?
- DaniFong 18y agoJudge talent at its best and character at its worst. Naively posting about one or two topics says little about one's programming ability, and much more about one's willingness to be open. It would mean a lot more if Pownce wasn't any good. But it was featureful, it seemed to work well, and quite a few people liked it. Dissing Leah for posting a few silly things is just nastiness.
- allenbrunson 18y agoi agree in theory, but ... converting a float to a string to compute an average? that's too much. and i don't see any evidence that leah had that much to do with pownce's features. if her blog is indicative of her code, my first guess is the other pownce people were doing all the work.
- DaniFong 18y agoshrugs. I've written a lot more code that's both more convoluted and didn't work. I'm not judged for this, because I don't often talk about it. But people should have the right to be occasionally mistaken on their own blog! I don't think the presence of such mistakes takes at all away from accomplishments. Hers is basically a coded version of what you'd do manually, eyeballing past the decimal. She's more familiar with string conversion than ceil, floor and round. So? That merits public judgment of incompetence? Of being an impostor?
- johnrob 18y agoJust goes to show that startups are more about making stuff people want than about technical ability.
- raffi 18y agoI'm learning this very fast (and the hard way unfortunately). I launched two technically deep projects to no response. Then I spent a week putting together a hack and people started buying.
- brandnewlow 18y agoI'm not entirely surprised by that. But think of it this way, your "hacks" will keep getting better and better and cleverer and cleverer. I heard a (probably apocryphal) story about Picasso being asked to sketch something at a restaurant once. He obliged, and doodled some lines on a napkin. Then he asked for a lot of money for it. The lady balked and said "but it only took you a few seconds." His response? "It took me 40 years." Decent blog post on the topic. http://www.ianlabs.com/2007/04/01/inherent-value-in-design/ http://www.ianlabs.com/2007/04/01/inherent-value-in-design/
- neilc 18y agoWas Pounce really "stuff people want"? Without knowing the terms of the Pounce acquisition, it's hard to say whether this is closer to success or failure. SixApart certainly aren't buying Pounce because of the quality/popularity of their product.
- petercooper 18y agoYou are right, but I don't see how that answers the GP posters' point. If Pownce was purchased just to be shut down, then I doubt very many people wanted it to make it economically viable.
- calambrac 18y agoSure, Pownce is no localeater.com or Mobile Drudge Report, but cut her some slack, huh?
- breck 18y agohttp://www.linkrap.com/teddyquote http://www.linkrap.com/teddyquote
- gcheong 18y agoI don't think you can judge a person's ability based on a couple minor things like these. I applaud her honesty and willingness to put herself out there and the fact that she got things out the door. A lot of developers I know would rather chew off their left leg before admitting to a mistake or flaw in their coding much less have the balls to publish it.
- aswanson 18y agoWhat was wrong with the CouchDBObject?
- brandonkm 18y agoWill be interesting to see what six apart does after this transaction. Seems like Pownce was always a "me too" web app that got some hype from being an idea of Kevin Rose. Its still a cool and useful app, just never had the critical mass to overtake twitter or become a real force in the micro blogging space. Despite this Pownce was a solid django web app, and its always good to see those out there.
- shafqat 18y agoWe're in the process of converting NewsCred to Django. We thought we'd be joining Pownce as one of the few larger-ish startups using Django, but looks like we'll be going at it alone. I was surprised to see the biggest team of Django developers was 10!
- crabapple 18y agoshutdowns like this are going to be common. 90% of existing websites have no viable chance of being self-sustaining by ads or subscriptions...but this shouldn't surprise anyone, at some point, a near-frictionless model coupled with strong winner-take-all economics is bound to result in a few dominant players choking off nearly everything else
- axod 18y agoI disagree. Creating a website/webapp is ridiculously cheap IF you do it well. There's no barrier for entry. Anyone in their bedroom could be the next twitter on a shoestring. Creating a website teaches you a lot, and is a lot of fun.
- crabapple 18y agoyes it costs you nothing but chances are it will earn you nothing. thats the entire point of my attributions of the web being frictionless and winner-take-all.
- elviejo 18y agoYeap twitter doesn't make any profit. A model worthy of emulation indeed.
- axod 18y agoYes twitter doesn't make a profit, but they have a massive userbase to sell to. I think they'll probably work out a business model if they put their mind to it.
- danw 18y agoAny one know if Pownce was profitable? They've had ads from the very beginning and there are pro accounts, it would be interesting to know how effective these revenue streams were.
- thomasswift 18y agoI'd be interested in a general sale price.
- diego 18y agoJudging from their traffic, any revenues must have been negligible. http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/pownce.com http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/pownce.com
- Jem 18y agoAlexa has never been a good measure of traffic. My blog has a much higher Alexa rank than pownce but has half the unique hits (based on numbers given above). I skewed my rank myself using the SearchStatus plugin for Firefox.
- axod 18y agoQuantcast is better often, but there isn't enough data on pownce to show up anything on quantcast. That's generally a bad sign.
- webwright 18y agoAlmost certainly not. 200k uniques per month (from Compete.com). Call it 3 page views per person (average). 600k page views. They charge $3/CPM for ads (that's $3/1000 views). Say they average showing 2 ads on every page view (I doubt they have that much paid inventory, but pretend they do). That's $6 earned for every 1000 page views, or $3600 per month. Double or triple any of the numbers in the formula and I still think you aren't in the ballpark. These are pure wag #s, of course. On the cost side, say that 1 fully loaded dev on starvation wages in the Valley costs $10k/mo (taxes, benefits, costs on top of an $80k/yr salary). Hard to tell with their about page, but it looks like they have 3ish FTEs. Add in office (dunno), servers (?), contract folks (legal, accounting, etc), and I bet you have a burn rate of $30k-70k/mo. If they are getting paid market rate, on the high side of that.
- callmeed 18y agoHere's what really bugs me: 2 months ago, Leah was on the cover of Inc Magazine and part of their "cool, determined, under 30" feature. They quoted the NY Times assessment that Pownce is "one of the hottest start-ups in the valley". Why is it so hard for the media (print and web) to cover technology start-ups and founders that are actually changing the world and/or making a profit? Are you telling me that 3 months ago the Inc editors saw Pounce as some huge, valley juggernaut–and now it's shut down? Or did they just have that much trouble finding good under-30 entrepreneurs? http://www.inc.com/magazine/20081001/ http://www.inc.com/magazine/20081001/
- ojbyrne 18y agoProfessional PR gets you into Inc. But it also increases your burn rate.
- petercooper 18y agoOr social connections. Given Kevin Rose's involvement, it was next to impossible for Pownce not to get more press than it deserved.
- ojbyrne 18y agoWell, PR had a lot to do with Kevin's notoriety. Sure he had a good start from TechTV (though apparently not enough to keep him on the air there), but there was a well-orchestrated (and expensive) PR campaign there too. I should know.
- petercooper 18y agoThat is true. It seems once you've put in enough to get onto the PR gravy train, however, paying for it becomes less than essential.
- pxlpshr 18y agoKevin's techtv personality aside, I associate a lot of Digg's early adoption to his participation on TWIT. When iTunes first started accepting Podcasts, TWIT was the #1 show with ~250k+ subscribers... as far as market demographics are concerned, this was a perfect fit for plugging his digg project -- which Kevin did a lot of for free! Consequently, I really like Kevin and I wish he never left TWiT. It was the old TechTV re-united and with everything in their control... one-by-one it seemed each person left or became less involved as TWiT launched them into different careers. Can't blame them tho -- TechTV and TWiT were fantastic springboards for all those involved.
- ComputerGuru 18y agoAnyone have any insight on how exactly Six Part benefits by closing down Pownce? If Twitter bought Pownce to kill it, I'd understand... but what's in this for Six Apart?
- petercooper 18y agoThey get the people. Stopping Pownce means those new hires won't be working on Pownce and they can be doing whatever 6A wants. Personally, I think this "acquisition" is a hiring technique. Instead of making Pownce look like a failure, 6A acquires it and shuts it down - the creators then look like heroes. If 6A had got them to shut it down and then hired them, they'd look like quitters running away to cushy jobs instead of being devoted to their startup. An acquisition makes it look a lot nicer in PR terms for both parties.
- gaius 18y agoAquisitions for people to put them to work on something completely different rarely make sense, unless you know for a fact up front that the key players are just as bought into the acquirers idea as they are into their own.
- blasdel 18y agoThey get to pretend to be relevant again. They get shiny PR-magnet people as employees, halfheartedly using Vox.
- ojbyrne 18y agoI'd bet they had investors in common (Ron Conway?) who put pressure on SA to let them save some of their balance sheet and some of their face. As an ancient example, that's how it went with Philip Greenspun's ars Digita and their asset sale to Redhat.
- Haskell 18y agoLooking at the comments, I have only one thought: Pownce was thrown to the sharks!
- sgoraya 18y agoTo restate the obvious, its definitely a great thing that they got acquired, so congrats to the pownce team. However, my brief experience with the app was to create an account, login 2-3 times afterward and then never touch it again. I was surprised, like a lot of other people, about the amount of press they were getting for such a mediocre app.
- greatreorx 18y agoI always thought Pownce was a solid product. Design, UI/UX, the site copy and marketing - overall I thought it was really well done. If it wasn't for the overwhelming success of Twitter or how easily Facebook launched the same features, things could have turned out much differently for them. It wouldn't surprise me if within 3-6 months, Six Apart launches a rebranded version of Pownce geared towards companies and enterprise to compete with Yammer. As much as it pains me to agree with Arrington and Calacanis, I'll admit that Yammer has a good business model. And I can't imagine that it would take a tremendous amount of development time to make Pownce ready for those types of customers.
- many 18y agoIncontrovertible proof that the will of the people is the will of heaven. Fuck you hackers.