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
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.
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.
Yeah, you can check out everybody’s profile without signing up: http://www.formspring.me/pims and you can see every public thread. And until very recently, you could even ask questions without being a registered user to the users who had this feature enabled.
The only “private” features you don’t see when not registered are your stream (similar to your Twitter timeline) and your inbox (similar to your FB messages).
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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].
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.
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...
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.
@pinwale Starting March 31st, no new content will be created on Formspring. The site will be in read mode only. Ping me tim {at} formspring.me if you want more info.
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.
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.
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..
> 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 :)
I think the plan is that if you have to manage costs as closely you describe (as you or I might), your revenue opportunities are too small to care about in comparison with the founders' expectations of a giant exit.
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.
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>
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.
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.
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.
I thought it was pretty interesting while it stuck to the "ask me anything" gimmick. I liked that idea, and I liked that you could get anonymous questions. But then I started seeing social details getting added that made me suspect they wanted more to be like Facebook than to be, you know, the unique presence they actually were. Not that I could blame them, but if I wanted facebook, you know, I'd go to facebook. So Formspring basically turned into an awkward imageboard/microblogging app. And then one day it was impossible for me to even log in. Except through the facebook app, from which I disabled my account (because AFAIK they're one of those sites which believes it should be impossible to actually delete your account) and never looked back.
