It's sad Formspring had to shutdown. But this must be a tough business to be in. They had millions of monthly active users, and yet couldn't pull it off as a bu

It's sad Formspring had to shutdown. But this must be a tough business to be in. They had millions of monthly active users, and yet couldn't pull it off as a business. This is why I find Entertainment vs Productivity to be a much better way of thinking about startups than B2C vs B2B. When you're in the Entertainment business, you're competing with everyone. Getting successful is a lot about staying in vogue for a long long time. And even then, someone well-established like Facebook is constantly threatened by little upstarts like Snapchat and Whatsapp. In the productivity market, you compete a lot more on product (see Evernote, Dropbox). It's not as easy to get early traction, but once you get it, it's a lot more defensible too. Some stats from Formspring's site (2011-2012) - Web Stats: • 365M page views per month • 20M unique global monthly visitors • 4.5M US unique monthly visitors • 28M global registered users • 8.6M US registered users • 3M monthly active users • Avg. 4.5 pages/10 mins. per session • Avg. 8K questions per minute • Avg. 2.5M responses per day • 4B+ responses to date • 60% connected to other social media • Avg. 50+ followers per user Mobile iOS Stats •Nearly 500K downloads •55M page views per month •250K unique monthly visitors •Avg. 12.5 pages per app session •Avg. 1 hour+ per app session Site Stats & Demographics •54% Female 46% Male (Global) •96% in the 13-34 age group •28M global registered users •4B responses to date •60% connected to other social media •Avg. 30 followers per user http://cdn.formspring.me/images/about/downloads/Formspring-BriefOverview.pdf http://cdn.formspring.me/images/about/downloads/Formspring-B...