Wildcard

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

~ the last words ~

Two posts went up on 16 March 2016, both signed by Jordan Cooper. One was addressed to the industry and titled "Tough But Necessary Change For Wildcard"; the other said thank you to the users. The operative clause was short. Beginning today, we will stop supporting the Wildcard App. The team roster disappeared off the website in the same week, and the Hacker News submission the next day collected four points and no comments.

Wildcard launched on the App Store on 13 November 2014 under the title "Wildcard, Browse a Better Mobile Web". The company had started in 2013 as Coopkanics and took the Wildcard name that August. Three people built it, all of them out of Hyperpublic after Groupon bought that. Cooper was chief executive, Eric Tang the chief technical officer, and Doug Petkanics ran engineering. It raised $3 million in seed money and then $7 million more in August 2014, led by General Catalyst with SoftBank Capital, Lerer Ventures and SV Angel alongside.

The idea was that the mobile web should not be pages. Tapping a link on a phone in 2014 meant waiting for a desktop document to arrive and reflow before it covered itself in interstitials, so Wildcard rendered the destination as a native card instead: a product, a review, a video, an article, typed and laid out properly and loaded fast. It was a browser in the sense that mattered: you gave it a URL and it showed you what was there. Its own App Store listing put the claim as combining the speed of a native app with the reach of a web browser.

~ the record ~

~ the card schema ~

Wildcard shipped a documented platform and expected publishers to build against it. Publishers were meant to host cards themselves at what the docs called card addresses: REST-style JSON over HTTP, each endpoint keyed by a url parameter, which the documentation describes as similar to oEmbed. The Card Schema defined five typed card types with required keys, and the docs are candid that the schemas were heavily informed by open standards and were a work in progress. There were SDKs in Java and Ruby, publishing plugins for Shopify and WordPress, a card validator, and a one-line quickstart for any site already carrying Open Graph or Twitter Card markup.

In February 2015 they went further and released an iOS SDK so that other people's apps could render Wildcard cards. That is the move of a company trying to become a layer rather than a destination, and nothing else Wildcard shipped was as ambitious. The Hacker News thread for it got six points.

~ version two ~

The browser did not take. A beta of version 2.0 went out to a thousand invited users on 13 July 2015 and showed about 40 percent retention, which was better than what the browser had been doing, so on 11 August 2015 Wildcard 2.0 shipped publicly and the browser framing was gone. The new product was called "Wildcard, Know the Day": a curated feed assembled by in-house editors out of thousands of publishers, with no exclusive deals and nothing to type a URL into.

It worked, briefly and in the way that does not compound. Apple made it number one New App of the week, which brought roughly 90,000 installs, and then put it in Best Apps of 2015, which brought 40,000 to 50,000 more. Lifetime total across both products was a few hundred thousand installs. An Android build existed by January 2016. Seven months after the pivot shipped, the whole thing stopped.

I never had this app. It was iPhone-only for its entire life as a browser, and Android arrived two months before the end. The deeper distance sits in the spec rather than the platform. Wildcard asked publishers to stand up card endpoints at their own URLs and keep them current. That is ongoing work for somebody, and the sites I was reading in Turkish were never going to do it for an American startup's reader app. The one-line quickstart for pages that already had Open Graph tags is the only path through that platform that would ever have reached anything on my phone.

~ the deep foul ball ~

Cooper's post-mortem is unusually honest about arithmetic. The growth and retention numbers, he wrote, were simply not good enough for a consumer-facing app to be a viable business, and at current burn the company had a little more than a year of capital in the bank. The money had not gone. He stopped it with twelve months of burn still available, deliberately, to keep that capital for whatever came next. The archive dates the cleanup: by 11 April 2016 the apex had dropped from 8,681 bytes to 448, served by a bare nginx instead of the Ruby stack, returning the raw unexecuted text of a PHP file that reads "you should not be here!". Tang and Petkanics started on something else that summer and went full-time on it on 4 January 2017, and that company is Livepeer. Cooper founded Pace Capital.

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