Frankly.me

» see frankly.me as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

the detail that makes me remember Frankly.me is the timing of its ending. an Indian startup raised a new round of money and then, a matter of weeks later, handed the money back and turned the lights off. that almost never happens out loud. i had no stake in it, it was a Delhi app for an Indian audience i was nowhere near, but the shape of that ending is the kind of thing that travels.

the app came out in 2014 with a clean idea. you could ask a public figure a question, an actor or a cricketer, and they would answer not in text but in a short video shot on their phone, face to camera. it was an AMA crossed with a selfie, and for a moment that felt fresh, the same year Vine and Dubsmash were teaching everyone that a few seconds of video was its own kind of language. Matrix Partners put money in early. the press in India paid attention.

~ the dossier ~

~ the hole in the middle ~

but there was a hole right in the middle of it. people showed up for the famous faces and left the second they had their answer. the fans did not turn to each other, did not build the back-and-forth that makes a place feel alive after the star logs off. so Frankly.me had traffic in spikes, whenever somebody big answered, and nothing holding the space together between the spikes. it pivoted, tried to become more of a general short-video app, closer to Dubsmash, but the pivot did not catch either.

~ the exit they chose ~

here is the part that stayed with people. the founders, Nikunj Jain and Abhishek Gupta, had just closed a pre-Series A round at the end of 2015. weeks into 2016 they looked hard at the numbers and decided the app was never going to find its footing, and rather than spend the new money slowly proving that, they wound the company down and handed cash back to the investors. Jain wrote it up without spin, that they had not reached a real product-market fit and did not believe they ever would. shutting a funded startup that fast, and saying why in plain words, is rarer than it should be.

~ what it saw early ~

the odd thing is that the core idea was not wrong, only early and pointed the wrong way. a few years after Frankly.me folded, the whole internet reorganized itself around exactly this, short vertical video of a person talking to a camera, on TikTok and on every feed that copied it. creators answering their audience on video became one of the main things the web is now made of. Frankly.me had that instinct in 2014 and could not build the engine under it. being right too soon, with the wrong shape, is its own particular way to lose.

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