Formspring Shuts Down | Hacker News Reader

Formspring Shuts Down

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37 pointsbriankim22 comments

Formsprint raised $14 Million? I'd like to see that business plan.

You do remember Instagram was bought for $1 billion having generated exactly 0 revenue, right?

I also remember them having pretty much exactly a bazillion more users than formspring.

That is to say: the evaluation of a business plan is a completely different horse than the price at which a company is purchased later on. The former says is "we'd really like it to get to X". The latter says "we actually made it to Y".

Well, actually Instagram had around 30 million users at the time of acquisition and according to the linked article Formspring also had around 30 million users at one point.

Having said that, I never used Formspring and didn't know anyone who ever had.

> Having said that, I never used Formspring and didn't know anyone who ever had.

Yeah, lies, damn lies and statistics ;-) I rarely ever saw a formspring Q&A that was bustling with activity while it was quite the opposite for Instagram. Not sure I like that, though, but I guess that's human nature.

They claim 4 billion posts - would be interesting to see the Q to A ratio.

Back when formspring was "big" a few years ago I remember seeing it all over the place.

We’re at 4+ billion responses. Obviously, many more questions were sent. If you were to guess 5Q/1R you wouldn’t be far.

Brutal ROI for writing a Q.

Direct questions hover around 1/1. Questions sent to followers, 5/1. It’s probably a higher engagement, albeit different, than Tumblr/Twitter/FB.

When you ask a question on Twitter, how many of your followers respond? Very few. The nature of both sites is obviously different, but the engagement on Formspring remains pretty good.

Also, there’s only so many times you can answer a question about your favorite movie, or where you met your husband/wife before it gets boring. Original questions (with photos, links, tags) get a far higher response rate.

You really think 5/1 is bad?

I guess you meant to write 1Q/5R

Not exactly.

Me asking 1Q to 5 users results in 5Q being delivered to the respective users. Out of 5, and depending on the quality of the question, the level of activity of these users, generally results in 1 to 2 responses.

Obviously the engagement is specific to the user asking the question. Some popular users easily reach a 75% engagement rate.

I was in high school when it was released. It was notoriously ubiquitous. Everyone had one. People said terrible things to each other - it was a free place to trash anyone you hated and really get them down.

Then, there was a rumor that Formspring was a huge fraud and was built as a complete joke and that they'd release the names of all the people who had posted questions on April Fool's. People freaked out and stopped posting, and those who had Formsprings released that they were happier without Formspring.

This is obviously a very microscopic look, but it wouldn't surprise me if Formspring did achieve the numbers they reported. I didn't know any peers of mine who didn't have one, back in the day and the "popular kids" at my school got hundreds of questions a week about everything.

Those numbers are real – even a tiny bit lower than the real ones just because round numbers are easier to remember.

Honestly, this was coming and everyone knew it. Only an illiterate would believe in someone trying to get rich building just forms. Sigh, I wish only one thing - That more people realized that you need to solve problems instead of trying to build the next cool thing! I wish this 14 million was donated to something else that could have impacted our lives - Like a new motor technology or an electric car. I can't imagine anyone rational funding 14 million on a company that had just forms (for consumers) as its business model.

Personally, I stopped using this service the moment it started spamming my inbox with boring questions.

Wufoo exited for 35 million. Although they didn't take 14 million in investment: just 118,000 according this:

http://techcrunch.com/2011/04/25/wufoo-35-million-surveymonk...

I think Wufoo solves a REAL problem - Collection of useful data. That's why it appeals to businesses and enterprises.

Whereas Formspring was more like a third party Facebook status box that served no real purpose (Their slogan was "Formspring is the place to share your perspective on anything."). The difference lies in the target audience - One was aimed at the consumer and the other at the enterprise.

Oh, I didn't know that. I thought they were a generic form site that pivoted into surveys.

I'm really not surprised, Formspring was around when I was in high school and to be honest I stopped using it after day 3 because it got boring and there was nothing too interesting about it.

Thanks for being honest.

Lots of respect for what these guys have done and accomplished but at the end of the day I have to ask can it pass the Shark Tank test.

It's about time!

Whoa, it was still alive? I thought all the cool kids had migrated to Ask.fm.

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