WeSeed

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

~ the last words ~

A site that teaches you the stock market by starting from the products on your own shelf only works if the shelf is stocked with companies you can buy shares in. In Ankara it mostly is not, and in 2008 nobody in my orbit was thinking about equities in any language. This one belongs to an American living room.

WeSeed was set up in 2007 by Matt Hulsizer and Jenny Just, who between them run PEAK6 Investments, and the line under the logo was the whole pitch: the stock market for the rest of us. It was free. You got a virtual portfolio and fake money to spend in it, alongside a search tool called WeSearch that took an interest you already had and handed back the tickers attached to it. Like a shampoo, own a piece of the company that makes it. There was a social layer underneath where people argued about the companies they used.

The premise came from Peter Lynch, who spent the eighties telling amateurs to buy what they understood and ignore the rest. WeSeed was that sentence turned into software, aimed at the specific feeling of standing outside a room where everyone else already knows the vocabulary.

~ the record ~

~ the worst possible month ~

It went public to users in October 2008. Lehman Brothers had collapsed in September. The Dow lost eighteen percent in a single week that month, and the American public was being handed a live demonstration of what the stock market can do to a person who invests in what they know.

Launching a friendly market-education product into that is either brave or unlucky, depending on which way the following year goes. The site kept running and kept being free, which meant it never had to prove that anybody would pay for the lesson.

~ five years of free ~

The reception was good. WeSeed was picked as one of twenty-four presenters at Finovate in 2008, Mashable wrote it up, PC Magazine gave it three and a half out of five, and the iPhone app that landed on 14 November 2008 was made a staff pick by Apple. That is a real amount of attention for a site that charged nobody anything.

Then five years passed with very little written about it. Free educational products die quietly because there is no billing to cancel and no invoice to explain, and the only person who notices the end is the one who typed the address that week.

~ the restart that never came ~

It closed on 31 August 2013, and the company said it was exploring ways to bring the site back. Nothing came back. weseed.com does not resolve at all now, which is a rarer ending than it sounds, since most dead startup domains at least get bought by somebody selling something.

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