[kickme444]

Hi, I'm the founder of Imzy. It's a hard day but I want to make myself available, especially to entrepreneurs who may have questions. This last 2 years has been fun, and hard and I've learned a lot. You can reply here or email me at [e-mail]

I also have an amazing staff of developers, community minded folks, product people, executives, who are looking for work. Many of them mare open to moving (we are in Salt Lake City) and all are open to remote work. They are all very talented. Please drop me a line if you're interested.

[rsync]

"Hi, I'm the founder of Imzy. It's a hard day but I want to make myself available, especially to entrepreneurs who may have questions. This last 2 years has been fun, and hard and I've learned a lot. You can reply here or email me at [e-mail]"

Have you considered contacting Internet Archive - or specifically, "Archive Team" - and coordinating with them to package up and deliver an archive of the public data that was produced on your platform ?

[kickme444]

No I hadn't considered this, thanks for the suggestion.

[nebabyte]

Hey Dan, I was a member in the early beta, am really sad to see Imzy go but really appreciate you guys branching off and making the efforts toward a new site (which I agree definitely still needs to exist).

> We still feel that the internet deserves better and hope that we see more teams take on this challenge in the future

As someone with a headful of ideas hoping to potentially take on this challenge (:P) - any writeups or info on scaling/architecture would be much appreciated. There are some HighScalability articles on the bigger sites but every bit of info on comparison of architectures helps us newbies, heh.

Also, as others asked about - if you guys do manage to open source, that could be a starting point for those who liked Imzy's layout/model (personally as one of the ones who likes aspects of "oldschool" and novel design concepts, I'd go in a diff direction; but the engine could still help me figure out components needed and possibly other scaling/metrics/etc logic)

Thanks for giving it a shot, take care man.

[pavel_lishin]

> any writeups or info on scaling/architecture would be much appreciated. There are some HighScalability articles on the bigger sites but every bit of info on comparison of architectures helps us newbies, heh.

I don't think Imzy's scalabilities issue is what did them in. I signed up to see what it was about, and saw a JS bug and reported it, and they not only fixed it super-quick, but also sent me a thank-you sticker. So their team, while imperfect as all teams are, was at least responsive and dedicated.

If I had to guess - and I do - their problems stemmed from their community size not growing as rapidly as it could have, and monetization.

That's the interesting thing - how do you build a community? How do you build a bunch of communities? How do you advertise, how do you tackle moderation successfully, how do you keep people invested, etc.

There's a billion write-ups on writing code, but nowhere near enough on running a meta-community.

[nemild]

I'll give you one piece of advice: beware premature scaling. If you have a headful of ideas, I'd focus on building something people want, not thinking about scale or other technical optimizations.

If you're an engineer like me, we'll often overweight tech choices, rather than the product and user acquisition decisions that matter in a social network.

[jboogie77]

Do you plan on open sourcing any part of the site?

[djsumdog]

I really hope they do. It may not be up to them and more up to their investors, but having a platform like this that people in the open source community can hack on may provide new great things further down the line.

[alexquez]

Sorry to hear you're shutting down. I know it's a terrible experience, but thank you for being open.

Can you explain a bit about how you tried to monetize the site? What did you try? What worked and what didn't?

[kickme444]

TBH we never got to the point of monetization.

[weewooweewoo]

I was really worried when you guys started giving out free pizza to members. Can I ask the story behind it?

[Elect2]

Could you share a brief of Imzy monthly traffic, bandwidth, and aws cost?

[Guest98123]

It looks like their traffic has been fairly flat. I'd guess just over 1,000 unique users a day based on their Alexa rating, and a number of sites I run for comparison numbers. At the peak of their popularity, it would have been closer to 2,000 unique users a day.

It's incredibly small for the amount of media attention they received. I think shutting down is the right, and responsible move here.

[oyeanuj]

Sorry to hear that but glad you guys made the effort that you did! As another founder in a similar space, I'd love to read a post-mortem from you. And if you are in the headspace right now to maybe just share a TLDR?

[drewmeyers24]

What are you working on?

[dennisgorelik]

What did happen with $11M in funding Imzy received?

https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/imzy

[wehadfun]

Why did you shut it down?

[kickme444]

We were unable to find growth in any cohort.

[aakriti1215]

Can you talk on the challenges and strategies of creating a community of people like Imzy? Not necessarily just online, but also in real life, how do you bring people together?

[Super_Jambo]

Sorry to hear about this although it's the first I've heard of Imzy.

Bit curious if there was any weighting algorithm in the voting?

[kickme444]

No, there wasn't. We never had enough volume to worry about that.

[sprt]

What would you have done differently?

[kickme444]

TL;DR - we over built. We were too close to the problem from our experiences at reddit and built WAY too much stuff that only really matters if you are operating at scale.

If we had done better with this, we could have gone to market quicker and probably done a better job finding product/market fit.

There's of course more, but this is the biggest thing.

[dredmorbius]

I'm looking forward to your post mortem.