Treehouse Hits The Deadpool; Founder Off To Google | Hacker News Reader

Treehouse Hits The Deadpool; Founder Off To Google

techcrunch.com

41 pointsthankuz15 comments

It would be great to hear a post-mortem on why the founders think they failed to get traction. I remember the Techcrunch launch post being very positive (not that these things are determining factors, but still).

I wonder if we will be hearing the same thing about Path a year from now? The two services seem very similar.

We were indeed the first to really identify the market for mobile photo sharing.

Really, indeed. I built an iPhone photo sharing app about two years ago (It was my self-assigned "How to program in Objective C" project), and there were at least several others that came before mine.

Don't forget MMS. That came long before...

Yup, as well as Mobog, Natuba, BuzzFeed, circa 2005.

So true. The mobile photo sharing space has been around for 5+ years, it's just that most users only caught on with iphones and other smartphones becoming more popular.

To claim that this space was 'created' last year and that 'sharing your cameraroll' was a brilliant innovative idea then, is just wrong.

Not knowing about BuzzFeed etc. and why they didn't catch on might explain why this attempt didn't catch on either. Remarkable that they didn't know who's shoulders they were standing on.

I think what he means here is, see the market opportunity and raise money against that, not just build it.

Even if that's what he meant, it's still false.

Even with that definition, there was Shozu, which was founded in 2001 and raised over $36M. At least by 2005, they had significant traction with their mobile photo sharing tools.

LightSurf, 1995, founded by Sonia Lee and her husband Borland founder Philippe Kahn: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LightSurf_Technologies

I remember signing up for Treehouse after that TC post and thought it was really cool. Tried to get my friends on it, but that failed (most people didn't have iphones at the time) so the app was useless for me.

Will the other cofounder be joining Google too or just Chris?

Is it just me, or are we seeing a lot of hip new Web 2.0 sites that are going under lately? Is lack of an actual business model the culprit?

Maybe you are just hearing about more of those that fail instead of them going quietly. If the majority of "hip new web 2.0" startups weren't failing in one way or anything the VC/Angel financing business would be pretty much printing money.

http://snaplog.com, http://clowdy.com and probably dozens more.

So close, yet so far. Sucks.

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