BranchOut

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

~ the goodbye ~

branchout never really reached me, and it barely reached anyone as a thing they chose. around 2011 and 2012 it spread through facebook the way a chain letter spreads, by borrowing your account to invite everyone you knew. i had a facebook account in those years and i probably got a few of those invites, the kind you delete without reading. it was the professional network you joined by accident.

the pitch was reasonable on paper. linkedin owned professional networking but felt like a suit, and facebook already held everyone's real social graph, so rick marini built branchout to turn your facebook friends into a job-hunting network. investors bought it. the company raised around forty-nine million dollars and hit a headline number of tens of millions of users in early 2012, adding close to a million in a single week at the peak.

the problem was that the users were not really there. branchout's growth came from aggressive invite prompts, not from anyone wanting the product, so the moment facebook cracked down on notification spam in 2012 the whole curve inverted. usage fell as fast as it had risen. the company pivoted to a workplace chat app called talk.co and nobody cared. in november 2014 it sold its assets to a firm called 1-page for about five million dollars, and the staff scattered to hearst.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the platform trap ~

branchout is a clean look at the risk in building your company on someone else's platform. every invite and every notification ran through facebook's pipes, on facebook's terms. when facebook decided that app-generated notifications were spam, it did not have to kill branchout. it just had to turn a dial, and the startup that had raised almost fifty million dollars was suddenly a ghost town it could not refill.

~ the peak that was not real ~

the tens-of-millions headline is the trap. those were accounts created by an invite blast, not people who opened the app twice. branchout confused installs with interest, which is easy to do when the numbers keep climbing. when the invites stopped, the real number underneath turned out to be small. it is the same lesson irl would relearn a decade later, with far worse consequences.

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