Blab.im

» see blab.im as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

by the time blab.im launched in 2015 i was 31 and far past the live-broadcast-yourself app wave that had crested on periscope earlier that year. i had no interest in being on camera in the format. blab.im was the four-way video chat that landed on top of that wave and tried to use it as a layer for unscripted small-group conversation. the model was simple: any user opens a 'blab' and up to three more can join. the show is the talk between those four, with everyone else watching and chatting in a side panel.

monkey inferno, the small workshop michael and xochi birch ran out of san francisco after they bought back bebo from aol, shipped the first version in april 2015. shaan puri was the ceo. the timing was unusually good. periscope and meerkat had primed the entire tech press for a live-video gold rush, and blab's group format was the only one not built around a single broadcaster shouting into a phone. the app got 3.9 million registered users by mid-2016 and the average active user was on for 65 minutes a day. celebrities like tony robbins and ufc fighters showed up. for a year the metrics looked like a winning startup.

then puri did the math on retention and could not find the path. only about 10% of the 3.9 million users were coming back regularly. the rest had opened the app once and not come back. on friday evening, august 12, 2016, puri announced over medium that blab was being shut down and the team was pivoting back to bebo, this time as a small-group hangout app. the website went dark that weekend. the funniest part of the announcement was the title: "blab is dead, long live blab." sixteen months on, sixteen months off.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the breakout ~

the april 2015 launch caught a media wave that had been building since meerkat at sxsw a month earlier. blab's specific innovation was the four-pane grid, which solved a real problem in the live-video product category. one-broadcaster live video is hard to make interesting unless you are already famous. four-broadcaster live video can run as a casual conversation that produces watchable content even when none of the four are interesting on their own. the format was a small structural insight, and the cult-of-blab on twitter ran with it through 2015 and the early part of 2016.

~ the decline ~

two problems showed up by the second half of 2015. the first was content quality: most of the four-way conversations on the platform were boring, because most groups of four randomly-assembled internet acquaintances are not actually interesting on camera. the second was facebook. facebook live launched broad in april 2016 and absorbed the live-video oxygen overnight. blab's specific format did not directly compete with facebook live, but the press attention and the new-user growth that had carried blab through 2015 evaporated when there was a much bigger story to write about.

~ the day it died ~

puri's medium post was unusually honest for a startup founder. he laid out the retention numbers and the content-quality problem, plus the realization that they had built a tool the wrong audience was using. the app had grown into a kind of always-on hangout for a small core group, and the founders had decided the small-group hangout was the actual product. they pulled the live-broadcast app to free engineering time for the relaunched bebo. the new bebo never reached blab's user count. blab died as a footnote to the periscope-era live-video moment, and bebo's relaunch died as a footnote to messenger and snapchat owning everything in social by 2017.

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