MessageMe

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

~ the eulogy ~

messageme launched on march 12, 2013 from a san francisco team of four founders. arjun sethi, alexander chee, justin rosenthal, and vivek tatineni had been working on it for around a year before the public release. the product was a mobile messenger that did the standard things, text plus stickers plus photos, but leaned heavily into voice notes and sketch drawings during a moment when whatsapp was still mostly text-first and snapchat was still mostly photo-first. it shipped on ios and android the same day, which was already a credibility marker against most ios-first startups of the period.

the launch went unusually well. messageme reached a million users in ten days, and five million in seventy five days. that put it in roughly the same growth curve as the early snapchat numbers. by may 2013 the company had closed a $10 million series a from greylock partners on top of the $1.9 million seed from first round, google ventures, sv angel, and andreessen horowitz. press coverage in the spring of 2013 treated messageme as one of the credible candidates to be the next big consumer messenger, alongside snapchat, line, kakao, and the early excitement around what was about to become whatsapp.

then the curve flattened. by late 2013 messageme was still adding users but slower, and the consumer-messenger market was sorting itself into national winners. whatsapp owned the global default, snapchat owned ephemeral photos, line owned japan, kakao owned korea, and there was not really room left for a fourth horizontal messenger out of san francisco. according to techcrunch's later reporting, snapchat had courted messageme during 2013 and 2014 with an acquisition offer, but messageme passed. the company kept building, and in october 2014 yahoo bought it for somewhere between $30 million and $40 million, well below what snapchat had reportedly been willing to pay.

my chat stack in 2013 was whatsapp plus skype, with the last traces of msn finally going away. a fourth messenger from san francisco was not going to displace any of those for me or for the broader turkish market. messageme was an english-language product launched at a moment when consumer messaging had already gone regional in a way that locked out new entrants. it never had a turkish-market push. by the time the brand died i had heard the name maybe twice in tech press and never from anyone i actually knew.

~ the dossier ~

~ the origin ~

what made messageme briefly interesting was the speed of the product. the team had built it on top of a custom realtime backend that performed noticeably better than whatsapp's at the time, particularly on flaky connections. messages delivered with very low perceived latency, voice notes played back without buffering, and the sketch-drawing tool became a small viral hook in the first two months. arjun sethi as ceo had a strong sense of product polish and pushed hard on the small touches. the app store reviews in the spring of 2013 were unusually warm for a brand-new messenger.

~ the yahoo deal ~

marissa mayer's yahoo was on an acquisition spree through 2013 and 2014, picking up small mobile teams to seed the company's pivot toward mobile-first products. tumblr was the headline buy. summly, jybe, distill, bread, ptch, and dozens of others followed. messageme fit that pattern. yahoo closed in october 2014 with the announced plan of building a new messaging product on top of the messageme codebase and the messageme team's expertise. that product became yahoo livetext, which launched in july 2015 as a silent-video chat experiment and was itself dead by december 2016. the messageme name disappeared from the app store some time during 2015 with no formal shutdown press release.

~ what replaced it ~

the messageme team scattered. arjun sethi left yahoo in 2015 and later co-founded tribe capital. the other founders moved on to other startups and to investing roles. the realtime backend tech that had been the company's best engineering asset stayed inside yahoo and got partially used in livetext and then nowhere identifiable after that. by 2026 messageme is a footnote that exists mostly as a cautionary tale in vc post-mortems about turning down strategic acquirers. taking the snapchat offer in 2013 or 2014 would have valued the team's equity in eight figures of snap stock at a moment when snap was about to go on its run. yahoo paid in cash and shut the product. the snap road not taken is the kind of counterfactual that people only see clearly after the fact.

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