Hipster

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

~ the goodbye ~

in early 2011 i was working on engineering stuff in ankara and the iphone photo app explosion was happening on a different coast in a different country. hipster was an app you opened in san francisco or in new york to turn a photo into a virtual postcard, stamped with the gps location where you took it. instagram had launched the previous october in 2010 and was already taking the iphone photo slot. the much smaller hipster window opened underneath it and never opened wide.

the launch had a memorable first move. in january 2011 the site went live as a single page that said hipster is coming soon and asked for your email. it collected 10000 signups in two days without telling anyone what it actually was, which became a small techcrunch story of its own about how to bootstrap a waitlist. the actual app turned out to be a photo postcard maker for iphone and android. you took a photo, picked a postcard template, the app stamped the location of the shot onto a decorative border, you sent it to a friend or posted it on hipster's own feed.

the founders were doug ludlow as ceo with ethan czahor on engineering plus steffen hoffman on design. the company raised about $1 million in may 2011 from google ventures plus lightbank plus 500 startups, alongside several smaller angels. that funding round was the moment the product had to convert the waitlist into actual usage, and the conversion was modest. by acquisition time the registered user count was around 500000, which sounds large in a press release and is small in the context of instagram already crossing 27 million users on its way to a billion-dollar facebook acquisition the same april.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the breakout ~

the postcard format itself was the part that read as clever. instagram was about the filter on the photo. hipster was about the frame around the photo, treating the image like a thing you sent through the mail rather than a thing you posted on a wall. the location stamp was a real innovation for the 2011 mobile photo app cohort. you could send a friend a postcard from a coffee shop they had been to, with the gps coordinates and a small map detail printed onto the border. that pattern got picked up later by various ios photo widgets in the 2010s.

~ what got buried with it ~

aol bought hipster on march 15, 2012 for a price in the lower seven figures, brought the team into the aol mobile group, and almost immediately ran into the broader aol product strategy chaos of the tim armstrong era. the aol mobile group was already in retreat by late 2012. on february 5, 2013 the hipster team sent a shutdown email giving users eleven days to download their postcards before the service went dark on february 16. all user data was deleted. nothing of the brand or the postcard format survived inside aol. doug ludlow went on to other startups, the postcard pattern eventually showed up in things like apple's own postcard share sheet years later, but without the hipster brand attached.

@}-->--

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

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »