Seesmic’s CEO: We built it, they didn’t come | Hacker News Reader

Seesmic’s CEO: We built it, they didn’t come

digital.venturebeat.com

33 pointsrokhayakebe35 comments

This was bound to happen. I've never understood why they continued to raise money and develop the product. It's as if they didn't understand the way most people operate and behave. No one wants to watch a 1 minute video of someone expressing their opinion when I could read the same comment in text in less than 5 seconds. And I've always gotten the impression that those who do actually make video comments, who actually position their camera, look into it, and press record, are those who think their opinion matters a bit more than the rest. Most of the time, from what I've seen, people try to project some sort of personality with their comments, which is fine and all, but that usually, in my opinion, takes away from what they're actually saying. Also, Loic always tried to pull it off as video for Twitter, which is really flawed. Twitter's beauty is in the speed of the information stream. I can glance at tweets tens at a time. You don't get that with video. And I didn't quite understand their raccoon mascot and what they were trying to pull off.

Also, video comments just look terrible. Awful. How am I supposed to take a video comment seriously when I see some guy in his pajamas with his face scrunched up into the camera? The experience of watching these videos is thoroughly unpleasant.

It's also a lot easier to compose and edit text a text comment on the fly than a video comment.

nod Video is fundamentally not a browseable medium. This is why video blogs never really took off, outside a relatively small and somewhat narcissistic segment: the format requires much more involvement, both on the part of the viewer and the part of the creator, and doesn't give a lot back for it.

Keep in mind that their widget has been on every page on TechCrunch for a long time (Arrington is an investor).

They really failed :(.

that's because the thing was useless, since the user had to go the extra mile to launch their widget.

Many companies succeed despite having no exposure on TechCrunch. This one failed despite having permanent placement on TC. Makes one wonder what the true value of TC coverage is, no?

they did manage to raise 12mil for a crappy product with no traction

So, if your target audience is investors, TC is probably the best possible place to be. If you actually want to sell real products, TC is probably not useful. We've been on TC once (alongside some other YC companies), and VentureBeat once (dedicated article), both very nice articles, and we were happy to have the coverage...but our best sales day ever during our first two years was when someone linked to our site in a comment on Slashdot (we've since reached a point where we regularly top that, but we still consider it a really good day when it happens).

I tend to be suspicious of companies and investors that only look to the various mouthpieces of the valley for their news. There's a whole world of business happening every day that TC and the other valley rags have no awareness of. That's OK, of course, as TC has its niche and serves it well. But, if you're not looking outward, you're missing a lot of opportunities.

Please note slide 2 of my presentations:

http://www.docstoc.com/docs/1857261/Whiner-Jerkins-All-Hands...

I told you so.

But Seesmic isn't dead. They've successfully pivoted, I'd say. They're growing on top of a hugely successful pair of platforms: facebook & twitter. The money they've spent in the last 6 months has certainly been better spent than all the rest, but you have to give them some credit for taking the bold move to change direction.

That's true, though I'd be even less inclined to buy into their company now.

Is anyone really surprised?

What about the people who invested 12 million dollars in the company. How many YC round is that?

I think those people were investing in mostly La Meur's name and not his company. Keep in mind, we didn't see his sales pitches, which might have been very convincing.

I tend to think that no matter how much people like Loic, when $12m gets raised and the product falls flat, somebody somewhere feels like they have a little egg on their face.

“I think it’s not a technology problem,” he said. “I think it’s a human problem, that there are very few people like you and me.”

While I can certainly sympathize with someone whose dream goes unfulfilled, blaming the Internet at large for not 'getting it' rather than acknowledging you were solving a problem no one apparently had is pretty haughty.

I didn't notice any blaming. I thought he was just saying that the market wasn't as big as he'd hoped.

Many successful startups originate in founders trying to solve a problem they themselves had. This may be a case where they did that, but it turned out there weren't enough other people like them.

I was never even tempted to think it would catch on. Video phones failed to catch on too--most people don't want to see or be seen when they aren't physically in the conversation.

There are video phones on a couple million desktops. They usually go by the name "Macbook".

Seesmic "failed" because people love to comment anonymously.

I don't really know much (anything) about this service but based on it being the "twitter of video" I would like to point out that video requires more of my attention so the content they offer would have to be dramatically better to interest me. I can read an entire page of my Twitter feed in about 10 seconds skipping the stuff I don't care about easily. I doubt I can watch 10 seconds of Seesmic and get any value out of it. Of course the other obvious problem is you can post video to Twitter by pasting a URL in. Whoever dumped $12M into this company didn't anticipate users were intelligent enough to use URLs to point to videos or assumed that any video content automatically appeals to users more than text. Either way, wrong.

Not surprised.

I don't know why it took them $12M to figure it out though.

It's not clear they've spent the whole $12MM. The submission headline includes spin not in the source article.

This is kind of off topic, but why do you write million as "MM"? I've noticed some people do it; is it a local-convention thing? What does the second M stand for? To me it means "millimetre" and although I can guess from context, just curious about it.

update: OK, answered my own question: It comes from Latin "Mille" meaning "thousand", so MM is a "thousand thousands". Apparently common in finance. Well, now I know!

You got it. It feels more natural for me to use the financial practice 'MM' than the scientific/computing 'M' for 'mega' when talking about dollars... though I'm sure I've sometimes used 'M'.

I suppose the fact that the unit has already been declared as a prefix -- '$' -- also sways the choice away from SI abbriviations just a little. 'M' for 'mega' is usually a unit prefix. So the usage consistent with MB or Mb or MHz or MW for dollars might actually be '12M$', which is just weird.

Everyone seems to use '$12K' for thousands, though, because the Roman M would be too prone to confusion.

I don't think it's a complete failure yet. I don't think they've spent 12 million yet either. They're adapting and guarantee they'll incorporate video into their new strategy. Their growth has stuttered sure, but they're clearly well into their new phase. Best of luck to him & the team...they've got some heavy competition.

What problem was Seesmic purporting to solve that justin.tv, stickam, and various others weren't?

Twitter succeeded in adoption because it required less time investment than a proper blog post; Therefore, if we reduce the time investment for video... ??? Profit?

What a waste of money. Not that this is the only example.

Poorly edited and lit video with bad content is not better than no video at all

So, are his VCs going to fire him for his honesty?

its not over till its over :)

after 12mm, and 2 years in the industry. Gaining only 250k uniques a month is a failure; only because im sure all the video cost a lot to put out.

It's a failure all right. 250k a month is simply terrible. I know people with personal blogs who do more than that, much more in some cases.

$12m dollars, 0.25m uniques a month, 24 months. Even assuming that they've had that consistently their whole life, that's 6 million uniques, ever. $2 for each visit to their site. Time to shut down - way past time, even.

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