Pownce

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

~ the obit ~

pownce launched on 27 june 2007 as an invite-only beta. it was made by a small team that included kevin rose (the founder of digg, then a tech-celebrity), leah culver, daniel burka, and shawn allen. the pitch was that pownce would be twitter but better. you could share short messages like twitter, but also files, links, and events. the interface was cleaner. the typography was nicer. the early adopter buzz was loud.

i tried pownce briefly in late 2007 when an invite found its way to me. i remember thinking the design was nicer than twitter. i also remember almost no one i wanted to talk to was on pownce. that was the killing problem.

pownce stayed invite-only for too long. by the time it opened up, twitter had locked in its network effect. pownce had a few hundred thousand users. twitter had millions. on 1 december 2008 pownce was acquired by six apart (the company behind movable type and typepad). on 15 december 2008 pownce was shut down. the team moved to six apart and worked on other things.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what was different ~

twitter in 2007 was just text. 140 characters. that was the whole product. pownce wanted to be more flexible. you could attach a file to your post. you could share a link with metadata. you could create an event and invite specific friends to it. you could mark a post as private to specific friends, public, or limited to a list.

the visual design was better than twitter's at the time. cleaner typography. better spacing. a simpler color palette. for designer-adjacent users, pownce felt like it had been made by someone who cared about the small details. twitter felt rushed.

the file sharing was actually useful. you could drop a small file (a song, a document, an image) and your friends could download it. this was years before file-sharing in chat apps was common. for a small audience of design-and-dev nerds, pownce file shares were a real workflow.

~ the invite-only mistake ~

pownce was invite-only from launch in june 2007 until january 2008. the founders thought scarcity would build buzz. it did, briefly. but it also kept growth slow at exactly the moment when twitter was learning to scale.

twitter had been around since march 2006. by mid-2007 it had network effects forming. when pownce launched in june 2007 with a twitter-like premise, the only way to get pownce to win was to acquire users faster than twitter. invite-only made that impossible.

by the time pownce opened up to all signups in january 2008, twitter had passed the inflection point. major media accounts were on twitter. politicians were on twitter. the audience that pownce wanted had already chosen.

~ how it died ~

six apart bought pownce on 1 december 2008. the announcement said the team would join six apart to work on movable type and other products. the pownce service would be shut down within two weeks. users had until 15 december 2008 to download their data. on that date, pownce.com went offline.

the acquisition was small. terms were not disclosed but industry estimates put it under 5 million dollars in stock. for a company that had raised real venture funding 18 months earlier, it was a fire sale.

six apart itself was acquired by SAY Media in september 2010. the former pownce team had mostly moved on by then. kevin rose went back to digg and then started other companies. leah culver later worked on the OAuth standard and several other things. daniel burka has had a long career as a senior designer at firefox, GV (formerly google ventures), and other places.

~ what it taught us ~

the case for moving fast on network-effect products. pownce had a better product than twitter on day one. it lost because it grew slower. for products where the value comes from who else is on the platform, slow growth is fatal regardless of product quality. twitter understood this and signed up everyone they could. pownce stayed exclusive and missed the window.

the acquisition-then-shutdown pattern. pownce is a small early example of what would become a common pattern in tech. small companies with real users get acquired by larger companies, the team gets absorbed, the product gets shut down within months. users are an afterthought. pownce users got two weeks to migrate. nothing they had built on the platform survived. modern acquisitions still mostly work this way.

the kevin rose factor. pownce was rose's first big follow-up after digg. it failed visibly. rose recovered (he has had a long career as an angel investor and podcaster since) but pownce is in his record as a reminder that even high-profile founders with real teams lose sometimes. that loss is meaningful. it is a useful corrective to the idea that successful tech founders just keep being right.

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