Loom

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

~ the obit ~

The name is the first problem. Say Loom today and you mean the screen-recording tool people paste into Slack, a company founded the year after this one died and large enough that the earlier Loom has been pushed off its own search results. The Loom buried here was a photo app, it lived for under ten months, and its entire public life fits between two TechCrunch posts.

It began as Popset, a group photo-sharing app out of Y Combinator's winter 2012 batch, built by Jan Senderek with two co-founders. The pivot came from a conclusion the team reached in public: people did not actually need more ways to share a photo with friends, they needed somewhere to put the four thousand photos already on the phone. Loom was announced in May 2013, went to beta in June, and launched on 24 July 2013 as an iOS app with a Mac companion. It uploaded your library, kept full resolution in the cloud, and left smaller versions on the device so the storage came back.

This was a real problem in 2013 and several good companies died on it. Everpix had shipped the best version and would run out of money that November. Picturelife was working the same ground. Apple's own iCloud Photo Library was still a year away from solving it properly, which left a window, and the window was the whole opportunity. In October 2013 Loom raised $1.4 million in seed money, with Google Ventures and Tencent in the round alongside Great Oaks and a few angels.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ bought and switched off ~

On 9 April 2014 Dropbox announced Carousel, a photo app that did what Loom did. Eight days later, on 17 April, Dropbox announced it had bought Loom, along with the collaborative notepad Hackpad, and that Loom would be shut down. The sequence is the interesting part. Dropbox did not buy a competitor and absorb its product. It had already built the product and then bought the team that had spent a year learning the same lesson.

Loom stopped taking new signups immediately. Existing users were given until 16 May 2014, which is twenty-nine days, to either export their library out to Dropbox or accept a transfer into Carousel. People who moved to Carousel had their storage allowance matched, and anyone who had been paying got a year of upgraded storage free. As wind-downs go it was handled decently, and nobody appears to have lost a photo.

~ where the photos ended up ~

Carousel did not last either. Dropbox announced in December 2015 that it was closing, and shut it in March 2016, folding the photo features back into the main Dropbox app where they stayed as a tab. So the users Loom handed over in May 2014 were handed over again twenty-two months later, to the product that had absorbed the product that absorbed them. The engineering was fine in all three places. What nobody had was a reason for the photo library to be a separate thing you paid for, once the phone makers decided it was a feature of the phone.

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