Formspring - A Postmortem

I worked at Formspring for a short period a little more than a year ago, and I left as they began to experience runway issues that were, more obviously each day, not going to be solved by another big funding round.

The talent assembled there was very impressive. They were a small team but full of fantastic engineers.

I also learned a lot about how expensive and challenging very large EC2 deployments are (but I also know how expensive and challenging very large colo deployments are. There's no free lunch.). I learned a lot from the Cassandra and Redis heavy design, and I got to play with tons of fun Amazon services (SQS, SimpleDB, etc).

I don't have the long-view of what went wrong aside from the fact that:

1) The site gained traction with young people who are fickle and eventually left. Maybe you could say the site didn't grow up with them. A lot like Myspace in that respect.

2) Everybody wants to answer questions about themselves, not enough people ask good questions.

3) There is no better place to ask all my friends "Where should we get sushi when we go to NYC next week?" and other types of Q&A, as well as the bread-and-butter questions like "What's the last dream you remember" and "If you were stuck on an island..." That sorta thing.

4) People always compare it to Quora, suggesting Quora is more successful. Well, they are in that they are still funded and alive. But the DAU numbers? I bet Formspring STILL, TODAY, weeks before shutting down, has more DAUs than Quora

On closing, I'll share my favorite Formspring story. It was my first time working on a popular Consumer product. When I released a feature (continuous deployment ftw), it went to millions of users. Well, one release was memorable to me. I think it was a redesigned Inbox or something, and immediately after the release you'd watch your instrumentation and Twitter for any hint of something going wrong. That was cool to me, that we have so many users of this social product that we can use Twitter as a real-time QC feedback mechanism. Anyway, a group of teenage friends on Twitter started discussing how they thought the update was lame, a waste of their time, and would Formspring please just give them something actually useful to them. Like what? One friend asked. The other replied "You know what would be bad ass, just a big fire breathing dragon on my inbox."

When the Founder saw these, a scheme was brewed. Through a bit of sleuthing and some good guess work, we found the Formspring accounts for these Twitter users. Somebody found a fire breathing dragon straight out of Ultima and a release was whipped-up that would display this dragon on these girls Formspring Inbox. We went from conception to release in 45 minutes. Then we just all sat in the office and waited. Needless to say, the girls shrieked with delight and I swear they were converted into Formspring lovers for life after that. It was a great little easter-egg just for these few users.

Anyway, it's not that riveting of a story, but it was a great moment to be on that team. I was new and mostly a bystander for that but it felt great to be a part of it all.

Odd that there's no mention of Tumblr's "Ask Me" (or Facebook's attempt, for that matter).

Formspring was getting some traction on Tumblogs, got a nice write-up on TechCrunch[1] et al, then Tumblr released their own version[2] two days later. A few months after that, Facebook started to work on their own[3], only to eventually kill it the end of last year.

The takeaway always seemed like Formspring was a feature (and a minor one at that), not a product.

[1]: http://techcrunch.com/2010/01/04/formspring-ask-me-anything/

[2]: http://techcrunch.com/2010/01/06/tumblr-formspring/

[3]: http://allfacebook.com/date/2010/04/facebook-currently-testi...

Help archive formspring:

http://tracker.archiveteam.org/formspring/

http://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=ArchiveTeam_Warri...

http://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Formspring

It's kind of interesting that he thinks anonymous questions should have just died, due to people abusing them. Whereas my experience of the site was that e-bullies would simply sign up new accounts immediately after being banned, since no banning occurred unless someone went out of their way to complain.

Plus, due to the media attention he alludes to, the moderation team was hyper-sensitive so pretty much any complaint could get the account banned. So once the trolls realized this, they started baiting normal users into posting something slightly against the rules (or better yet combing history), then complaining and getting the victims banned. Then, if the victim doesn't contest the ban (you have to go out of your way to even figure out how to do this) and instead creates new accounts, the troll just reports those for more automatic bans.

All of this without affecting the troll, because the troll isn't using accounts they care about, if any at all. Anonymous trolls aren't much different than pseudonymous trolls, after all.

After a couple rounds of this, almost everyone I knew just gave up and moved on.

I've had this exact same experience before - you build a neat core product that gets a decent core following, but then your team isn't sure where to go next. The first thing that always happens is that everyone has ideas for new features to bolt on that they've seen elsewhere.

The discussion quickly moves from 'How do we make this better?' to 'How do we implement this feature?'. Engineering logic kicks in - this is a great challenge! We need to show how well our design works - during the design phase, we kept in X and Y which we can now leverage to complete this new feature!

Once you've moved from thinking out what the customer wants to use to 'how do I make this thing work? should I cut a corner?', then you have already lost the customer's attention.

The article has a great take away and I agree with it completely. Don't add features until you understand how and why the customer is going to use those features, and most importantly, if the customer will pay (or increase retention) for that feature.

As I was reading this, all I could think to myself was "wow, I would've done the exact same thing" in almost every circumstance Formspring found themselves in. Bottom line is: it's easy to play armchair CEO when reading a post-mortem (and hindsight is always 20/20) but I think the fine people at Formspring deserve a well-earned pat on the back.

They tried, they failed, and they will undoubtedly try again. As the old adage goes, fortune favors the bold.

"Our initial graphs at Formspring, as you probably know, all hockeysticked up and to the right. Nearly straight up. Oh wait, the graph has peaked and is starting to slowly (very slowly) trend downward. What do we do? Make big bets, right? Try to recapture that crazy growth!"

Make big bets?... And then what? You had a ridiculous # of users in the initial stages, and couldn't make a profit from that. What made you think just getting more growth would solve all your revenue problem? ..Wait.. you were waiting for a white knight in shining armor (ala Google/Twitter/etc) to acquire you. Ah, I get it now.

Were there any acquisition offers during that hockey-stick phase?

No mention of Ask.fm? Seemed like the European clone had been picking up a lot of steam lately. (see http://techcrunch.com/2012/06/27/ask-fm-claims-its-overtaken...)

FWIW, Cap left the company 18-24 months ago. From looking at the quantcast information (now blacked out), it seems traffic started to fall when Facebook changed their policy around content syndication in a users newsfeed.

It is tempting to look back and say "could have done this, should have done that", but sometimes, maybe, there was nothing to do differently.

"Every generation throws a hero up the pop charts." -- Paul Simon

Original art?

http://blog.tetuanvalley.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/thep...

Source:

http://blog.tetuanvalley.com/2011/11/beware-the-trough-of-so...

This sounds a lot like Dwolla, especially the part about designing toward your own biases.

I don't want to say any details, but I've chatted with a few of their team briefly and their devotion to their vision is either going to shoot them in the foot or it's got some genius element that isn't obvious to me.

Don't forget that ArchiveTeam is currently busy taking a copy of Formspring before every piece of content is removed on the shutdown date.

http://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Formspring

I gave up reading and just did a Ctrl-F for the phrases "profit", "revenue", "business model", and "money". 0 of 0. That's the f%^&king problem!

Awesome write up. I'd love to know what the plan for monetization was. Was it simply hoping you'd be acquired or did you have plans to monetize directly from users.

News to me that anonymity was a key feature. Formspring presented itself to me as a service for webmasters.

Should have transformed into a dating site. Could have made millions.