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Pownce is Gone and It’s Kevin Rose’s Fault
We’ve learned today that the microblogging service Pownce has been acquired by Six Apart. It also appears that Pownce will close in two weeks from today. While financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, it appears it was a deal to get some programming talent.
Mr. Ha at VentureBeat has a good overview of the deal and what it means for the team. Ha notes, "Culver and Mike Malone, who were Pownce’s main developers, will move on to similar roles at Six Apart. Though Pownce won’t be a part of Six Apart, you can be sure the two will be working on something related to the “rebalancing” effort that Six Apart chief executive Chris Alden mentioned." Apparently Kevin Rose will remain on as a Six Apart advisor.
The sad reality here is that Pownce had a HUGE opportunity that was wasted by Pownce co-founder Kevin Rose. Instead of Kevin using his huge network to push Pownce, he pushed their biggest competitor Twitter. With 75,000 followers on Twitter, Rose could have easily moved (at least a large percentage of) them over to Pownce and made the service more active. I’ve watched how loyal Rose’s fans are and they would have helped to build Pownce up, instead of allowing it to be sold for scraps. It’s a pretty shocking business strategy.
I can’t imagine how the team must feel building a tool that one of the founders doesn’t even actively promote! Take this as a lesson for your startup, actively use your own service or watch it fall apart!
oh allen – you missed the point that kevin wanted to build kevins brand not pownces brand
The assumption that Kevin Rose could have pushed Pownce to success, simply through his network is ridiculous. Pownce was a late and not even innovative copy of Twitter.
Pownce LOOKED great, but lacked the usage that Twitter got. Could it have been the API?
Pownce never really understood, uptime is far more important then new features.
I think you’re being a bit hard on Kevin. He did push it earlier on, but ultimately he needs to be where the people are and hardly anyone was using Pownce.
The real issue was the early implementation: no API and no Desktop app so they never capitalized on early interest, and by the time both came around it was far too late to save it.
Duncan: they had both an API & a Desktop app via AIR.
they had up time failures of the same magnitude as twitter, and had a revenue stream (pro accounts), what they lacked was the ability to post via a non-browser enabled phone.(SMS)
the question is why has twitter succeeded, since it has no media & as far as I can tell, no revenue stream?
Even if all 75k of his followers went to Pownce, it probably still couldn’t be saved. It was boring and, frankly, who can beat Twitter right now?
Clarke,
Duncan didn’t say they didn’t have those things, he said they didn’t have them early on, which was entirely true. They also didn’t allow you to send large files to people who weren’t members of Pownce until early 08. I know those three things curbed my use of the service from day one. I always thought it was cool, just not useful enough to warrant going back versus using Twitter and later FriendFeed.
allen, i think you raise a good point. if i were pownce i would have said to me -> http://web-poet.com/2008/12/04/note-to-self/