Blippy

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

~ the eulogy ~

blippy was a valley product for valley people, i read about it in techcrunch in 2010 and never got the appeal. the pitch was that you linked your credit card (or your amazon account, or your netflix, or your itunes) and blippy posted every purchase to a public feed. your friends could see what you had just bought at whole foods for $47.83. it was framed as "twitter for money" and the people building it thought this was going to be a fundamental new social layer. it was 2010 in san francisco. everything was going to be the next fundamental social layer.

the founders were ashvin kumar as ceo, chris estreich as cto and philip kaplan (of fuckedcompany.com fame in the previous cycle) as cofounder. they raised about $1.6 million from charles river ventures and sequoia and angels like evan williams and jason calacanis. later rounds got them close to 13 million total and a paper valuation reported at $46 million. the company was headquartered in palo alto and had that classic early-2010 valley-startup profile: young, well-funded, backed by the same investors as the last five things, aimed at people who lived on twitter and had disposable income to broadcast about.

i was not on this feed. by 2010 i was 26 in ankara, msn was still where turkish friends chatted, facebook was the growing social layer. the idea of publishing your credit card statement to acquaintances did not feel like a category people were about to want. even in the US, the sign-up conversion never got to a real number. by may 2011 blippy had 100,000 registered accounts and only 30,000 had ever posted a single purchase.

~ the dossier ~

~ the origin ~

blippy got press because the founders were connected and the pitch was legible. techcrunch loved it, the new york times ran a piece on it, mashable did the "is oversharing the new normal" hot take. peter shankman wrote an early column defending it. the case for it was that people were already broadcasting their locations on foursquare, their meals on twitter, their photos on instagram (which had just launched). purchases were the last private social layer. blippy was going to open that.

the case against it was more direct. purchases are not neutral events, purchases have prices attached, and once you attach prices to social feeds you get comparison behavior. also nobody really wanted their coworkers to see them buying skincare at $180 or their in-laws to see them buying beer at 11am on a tuesday. the affordance sounded good in a pitch deck. the actual experience was uncomfortable.

~ the leak ~

on 23 april '10 mashable ran a story that four blippy users' full credit card numbers were sitting in google's search index. it turned out that during a beta phase somebody had put raw card data inside a hidden div tag on the transaction page. google crawled the pages and cached the numbers. the leak was small in absolute terms, four people, but for a company whose entire product was "trust us to be careful with your payment data" it was the wrong four people. management response was a blog post arguing the incident was less severe than reported, which is a tell in itself.

the damage was reputational rather than operational. blippy did not lose massive money in the leak, they lost the ability to keep telling the story that this was a serious startup with grown-up security posture. after april 2010 the growth curve, which had never been steep, flattened out and stayed flat.

~ the actual end ~

in may '11 blippy announced it was shutting the consumer service and pivoting. huffpost ran the "bye bye blippy" post that same month. the pivot was to a q-and-a product about products, which is basically what quora already was, and it did not survive either. ashvin kumar went on to found tophatter, chris estreich went to other startups, philip kaplan continued being philip kaplan. no acquirer took the corporate entity, the domain redirected for a while and then went dark.

the interesting inheritance was philip kaplan himself. he had built fuckedcompany.com in 2000 to document the first dot-com collapse and became a chronicler of dead startups. then he cofounded one of the more clearly-doomed startups of the 2010 wave. that is either a cosmic joke or an occupational hazard for people who understand the funeral business well enough to run it and still miss the coffin they are lying down in.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »