Tsū

» see tsu.co as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

tsu was the kind of social product i would have left in the inbox unopened. it launched in october 2014 with a pitch that promised users 90 percent of the ad revenue generated on what they posted, plus a cut of revenue generated by anyone they referred to the platform. the math made every user a recruiter and every recruiter a downstream beneficiary, which is the recognizable shape of an mlm dressed up in feed clothes.

the model worked on a metrics dashboard for about three months. tsu hit two million sign-ups in early 2015 because users had a direct financial reason to share invite links to their entire contact lists. by the time the platform announced shutdown in august 2016 the company was claiming 5.2 million registered users, although mobile-analytics firm sensor tower counted only 1.5 million app installs across ios and android over the full lifetime.

i was thirty when tsu launched, four years out of university, working as a computer engineer and using facebook and twitter the way most of my cohort did. a referral-pyramid social network was the wrong product at the wrong moment for me. tsu's user base was self-styled creators and social-media-marketing types who saw the revenue-share as a way to monetize whatever output they already had.

~ the dossier ~

~ the unraveling ~

the structural problem was visible from launch. paying users to share invite links generated invite-link spam in the only place those links could travel. facebook started blocking tsu.co outright in september 2015, citing aggressive sharing patterns that violated platform rules. apple's app store rules around pay-per-install effectively boxed tsu's reward mechanic into a permanent gray zone where the company had to keep restructuring the math to stay listed.

the network effect was working in the wrong direction. every new user joined to get paid for referring others, which meant the platform never accumulated the kind of conversation graph that holds a social network together once the bonus pool empties. tsu's engagement numbers were inflated by referral-chasing rather than by content people actually wanted to read.

~ what really happened ~

on august 16 2016 sebastian sobczak posted that tsu had been taken permanently offline. the cited reasons were the cost of running the platform and an inability to complete the last funding round. the second reason is the real one. by mid-2016 the social-product investor class had cooled on yet another facebook-alternative pitch, the engagement numbers no longer told a clean growth story, and the unit economics of paying users 90 percent of ad revenue do not produce a profitable saas business.

tsu briefly returned in 2019 as tsu.social under a different team that bought the brand. the second incarnation never reached the original user count and quietly faded. the cultural artifact remains the 2014-2016 original run, the one that mainstreamed the question of whether paying users to post would change anything about how social products grow.

@}-->--

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

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »