Urturn

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

~ the obituary ~

Urturn's users were teenagers, mostly girls, mostly American with Britain a clear second. I was twenty-nine the year it took that name and working as an engineer, which puts me outside this one on both counts. What makes it worth a stone anyway is the money: a Swiss company raised $13.4 million to sell self-expression to fifteen-year-olds and then went dark inside two years.

The company was founded in Lausanne in 2008 and the product launched in early 2011 as Webdoc, built by the brothers Stelio and Alexandre Tzonis together with Mathieu Fivaz and Vincent Borel. Half a million dollars came in from family and friends first. In January 2013 Webdoc was relaunched as Urturn, a reset rather than a new coat of paint, and an iPhone app followed in May. On 22 May 2013 the company announced its Series A: $10.7 million from Balderton Capital and $2.7 million from the private equity arm of Debiopharm Group, the Lausanne pharmaceutical house, which is not a name you expect on a teen social app's cap table.

The product itself was templates. You picked one, dropped in your own photo or your own text, and the result could be posted on Urturn or pushed out to Facebook and Twitter. The company's own description called it a social platform empowering people to express themselves and interact with others online in ways that had not been possible until now, which is a lot of words for a meme generator with a feed attached. The next step was going to be an API so outside developers could build templates of their own.

~ the case file ~

~ the climb ~

For about eighteen months this looked like a category. TechCrunch described Urturn as a social expressions platform that let teens create memes and movements, and 2013 was thick with funded attempts at the same idea under different names. The brand side worked better than the consumer side ever did. One Direction ran campaigns through it, the London press got a headline out of Alicia Keys being a fan, and the plan was for music brands plus affiliate deals to carry the revenue while the user base grew.

It was run across Lausanne and London with an office in Silicon Valley and about 25 people, writing Ruby on Rails. Twenty-five people and $13.4 million is a real company, and it is also a burn rate with a deadline attached.

~ the 503 ~

Wikipedia gives this two sentences: development stopped in December 2014, and the platform shut down completely in early 2015. The first half matches the record. The second half does not.

The Internet Archive has urturn.com answering 200 as late as 9 July 2015, with the same marketing copy still in the page head. On 22 July the capture is a 503, and so is every capture after it, until the crawler stops finding anything at all in the autumn. The real retreat shows up earlier and in a different number: the homepage dropped from around 31 kilobytes in late October 2014 to around 11 kilobytes by mid-November, and stayed small. Something large was taken out of the front page about six weeks before development formally stopped.

There is no farewell anywhere. The last version of the site was still advertising rich social conversation that happened just like it does in real life, to nobody, on a Rails host that eventually stopped having anything behind it. A 503 is what a dead web application looks like when the server outlives the company by a few weeks.

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