Albumatic

» see albumatic.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

The 2013 photo app was a specific and now extinct genre. Instagram had already won, so nobody was competing with Instagram directly; everyone was instead attacking one of the things Instagram was bad at. Albumatic picked the shared album. You shot something, the app noticed which of your friends were physically near you, and it offered them a way into the same album so the event ended up in one place instead of six camera rolls.

It launched on 21 February 2013 and got attention for who was behind it. Adam Ludwin had been an investor at RRE Ventures, where he had led the firm into Vine, and he had left to build something himself in the category everyone told him not to. Devon Gundry built it with him. Close to a hundred thousand people installed it in the first fortnight, and by March an SEC filing showed a round in progress that closed at four point two million dollars, led by RRE with betaworks among the names alongside it.

None of that was ever going to reach here. It was an iPhone-only app in a country where the phone in most pockets was Android, it needed your friends to already be on it and standing next to you, and its entire life happened inside one American app-store news cycle. By the time anybody outside that cycle could have heard of it, the team had stopped writing it.

~ the case file ~

~ the second try ~

They took the app to SXSW in March and watched how it was actually being used, which turned out to have almost nothing to do with events. People were building running albums of their own lives, closer to a scrapbook than to a party. So they threw the product away and shipped a different one on 1 August 2013 under the same name.

The rebuilt Albumatic had no location features at all. You made albums, you followed other people's albums, and you invited collaborators into yours with a public or private setting. Ludwin said at the time they wanted to keep trying until they found the fit that reached tens of millions of users. That version got three months.

~ the frozen front page ~

On 5 November 2013 the company renamed itself Koa.la and announced it was going to build lightweight things called Cards inside Kik instead. Ludwin was careful not to call it a shutdown. The app was doing fine on numbers, he said, and they would keep supporting it; they just would not be working on it. The reasoning he gave is the cleanest statement of the mobile app market anyone made that year: if you are a mobile app, either you are growing very fast and you are one of the three that matter, or you are one of everyone else.

Nobody ever went back and turned the website off. Albumatic.com kept serving the same page for six more years, a phone mockup over the words Beautiful, shareable photo albums, with a Download Now button and a field where you could have the app texted to you. The archive has it working like that in 2015 and again in January 2019. By 15 January 2020 the domain had gone to a broker and was listed at $19,995.

~ the inheritance ~

Koa.la's first game, Costume Party, had a million players in its first twenty-two hours and was closing on four million within weeks, which was more traction than the photo app ever had. It did not turn into a business either.

What the team did next is the part worth recording. In 2014 Ludwin and Gundry, along with Ryan Smith who had come in as Koa.la's CTO, founded Chain, an enterprise blockchain infrastructure company whose customers ended up including Visa and Nasdaq. On 10 September 2018 Chain was bought by Lightyear, the commercial arm of the Stellar foundation, the merged company was renamed Interstellar, and Ludwin ran it. Five years and two pivots from a photo album app that nobody outside New York got to use.

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