Togethera

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

~ the goodbye ~

Sokratis Papafloratos had already built and sold TrustedPlaces, a London review site, before he started Togethera in 2013. His co-founder Matt Dempsey came from Facebook. The two of them had looked at the same problem from opposite ends: one had spent years making strangers' opinions public, the other had worked inside the largest machine ever built for showing your life to people who were not in it.

Togethera was the correction. You made a group, you put photos and short updates into it, and only the people you had added could see them. No public profile and no followers, no feed of things you had not asked for. Grandparents got email notifications with the photos inside, so they never had to install anything. The web version opened in September 2013 and the iPhone app followed on 17 July 2014.

The money came in two small rounds. A £250,000 seed in early 2014, then £220,000 more in September 2015 to push on with growth. By the end there were about 65,000 registered users, which for a private app with no viral loop is not an embarrassing number. It was just not a number that produces revenue.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the arithmetic ~

The shutdown email, sent on 4 July 2016, did not reach for a story. "Unfortunately we're not generating enough revenue to cover our costs, and our user base isn't growing fast enough to suggest our revenue issues might be solvable soon." That is the whole failure in one sentence, and it is unusually honest for the genre.

Private by design is an expensive promise to keep. The thing that made Togethera worth using also meant it could never grow the cheap way: nothing was public, so nothing could be found, so every new user had to be dragged in by somebody already inside. A premium tier that printed your favorite photos was tried. It did not move the number.

~ the harder problem ~

An app for families has to be installed by a family. That is a much higher bar than it sounds, because it means persuading the least technical person you are related to that there is a new place now, and that the photos will be there instead of where they have been going. In 2014 the place the photos were already going, nearly everywhere outside the United States, was a WhatsApp group that cost nothing and that everyone's mother was already in.

Turkish families settled this question without ever hearing of Togethera. The family group chat cost nothing and ran on whatever cheap Android phone was in the house, and it was already open. A better-designed album with its own login and its own invitation flow was never going to displace a thread that was simply already running.

~ what is still standing ~

Users got three days after 4 August 2016 to pull down everything they had put in. The company's side project, an app called Upshot where pictures deleted themselves after a week, closed in the same announcement.

togethera.com still resolves. The page is one green wordmark and two lines: "Togethera has shut down", then "After almost 3 years bringing families closer together, Togethera shut down on August 4th 2016." The logo at the top of this page was taken from that server this week, ten years after the thing it belonged to stopped working. Somebody is still paying for the domain.

@}-->--

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

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »