Grou.ps

» see grou.ps as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

I did not build a community on grou.ps, but i knew the name, the way anyone who followed the turkish tech scene in the late 2000s knew it. It was our web 2.0 success story, the startup that came out of istanbul and got written up on the american blogs, and for a while it looked like the thing that would finally prove a turkish company could ship a global product.

Emre Sokullu started it in 2005. The pitch was a build-your-own social network, the same category as ning, where you spun up a private facebook for whatever group you had, a fan club or a school class. It worked. By 2008 it was doing eight million unique visitors a month and a hundred million pageviews, and over its life it claimed hundreds of thousands of communities and millions of members.

Then the 2008 recession hit and sokullu made the call that saved the company and capped it at the same time. He turned grou.ps into a paid service. It became profitable by 2012, which almost no consumer social product ever managed, but charging money is how you stop a free-signup network from growing, and it stopped. By 2015 it had narrowed to fitness communities under a gymgroups brand, and across the rest of the decade it wound down. By 2020 it was over.

From ankara i watched it the way you watch someone from your town make it out, with a specific kind of attention. Grou.ps did not fail the way the pets.com generation failed, loudly and out of money. It made a sober decision to survive, survived, and then shrank. That is a rarer and quieter way for a startup to end, and it is the one i think about, because it is the one that could happen to the sensible engineers i actually know.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the scene it came from ~

Turkish web 2.0 in the mid-2000s was a small room of people who read techcrunch and wanted to build the local version of what they saw there. Most of it never left turkey. Grou.ps did. It raised money, it got covered abroad, it competed head-on with ning in a category americans thought they owned. For the engineers back home it was proof that the door was not locked, that you could sit in istanbul and build something the whole web used. That mattered more than the product did.

~ the decision that saved and shrank it ~

The pivot to paid is the whole story. Free social networks live or die on growth, and grou.ps chose survival over growth at the exact moment the recession made that look wise. It was probably the correct call for the company and it was fatal for the dream. A profitable niche tool is a fine business and a small legacy. The version of grou.ps that people remember is the 2008 one, eight million strong and still climbing, before it decided to be careful.

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