Color

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

~ the obit ~

color was silicon valley press, not a product i ever saw on a phone in turkey. its march 24, 2011 launch was a us tech-blog story for two reasons. it had raised $41 million from sequoia and bain before shipping a single user-facing screen. and the founder, bill nguyen, had just sold lala to apple for a reported $80 million the year before, which made him the kind of person whose next thing got automatic press.

the app itself opened to an unlabeled screen of photos taken by strangers near you. the thesis was that proximity would generate social value on its own, that if you were in the same coffee shop or concert as a hundred other phone users, you would naturally want to share photos with them. nobody at color had quite explained why the strangers would want this. the launch reviews described the interface as confusing, and the app store rating settled at two stars in the first month.

color downloaded one million times the first month. by september 2011 the active user count had collapsed to about one hundred thousand, with co-founder peter pham gone since june 2011 and chief product officer dj patil out shortly after. bill nguyen stepped away from day-to-day operations in september 2012. apple acquired the team in october 2012 for around $7 million, primarily for the engineering staff and the patents, and the app was delisted by the end of the year.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ how it landed ~

the launch made every us tech blog the same week, with most of the coverage centered on the funding rather than the product. the funding was actually the story, since $41 million pre-launch was unusual even by 2011 silicon valley standards. when the app shipped and confused reviewers, the secondary story became how a check that size could go to a product nobody understood. the answer was bill nguyen's track record at lala plus a sequoia partner who was confident the proximity thesis would work. it did not.

~ the cracks ~

the proximity thesis assumed that strangers near you were a feature rather than a confounding variable. in practice the people who downloaded color opened it once and closed it. the photos on the screen were from strangers in places they did not particularly care about, and there was no reason to come back. there was no friend graph to bootstrap onto and no way to see only people you actually knew. by mid-2011 the engineering team was rebuilding the product around video instead, which did not save anything either.

~ what got buried with it ~

color sits inside a class of 2011-era investments that paid for the founder's previous exit instead of the new idea. the apple acquisition was small enough that it was effectively a soft landing for the engineers, with the patents and the talent absorbed into apple's photo and location teams. nguyen quietly moved on to other projects. proximity-based stranger sharing as a category did briefly come back as around-me location apps a few years later, all of which also died, and the proximity-photo idea has not seriously come back since.

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