I’ve been looking around at companies to cover and I keep hitting companies that are gone or appear to be gone. The one I hit today was Wamily (which was even covered by Mashable). As their site says:
That’s all, folks.
Wamily is offline indefinitely while we re-think and re-work some things. It was great while it lasted, but alas, starting a social networking startup is harder than we thought.
I don’t know if people who went through the trouble of using Wamily got any warning of the plug pulling. I do know the site was functioning a few weeks ago when I went to check it.
I think this highlights that it is really difficult to build a pure social networking site (kinda like the Wamily folks said; I like to state the obvious sometimes). If, as a user, I have to worry about a site going away then am I really going to trust a new site with my data (of course, this then evolves into an argument for data portability). This is one of the reasons I’ve resisted joining new social networks as much as possible. But that doesn’t mean that I’m not a member of quite a few including LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Dopplr, and probably many others that I can’t remember at this point. The other problem with social networking sites is that you usually have to re-enter all of your data when you join a new site (again, an argument for data portability or rather social network data portability). This makes me really think about the potential value of a new site versus data entry pain (not to mention invite annoyance to my contacts). Usually sites can’t make it over my personal hurdle of value versus pain.
Personally, I think it’s time to move on from working on the newest whiz-bang social network with a twist and focus on something else. Yeah, the current social networks don’t do everything that everyone wants them to do but neither do most other online services. This isn’t to say that a great social networking platform couldn’t be created that kills off all the others. Remember what happened to Yahoo, Excite, Ask Jeeves, and others (anyone remember HotBot, Altavista, and Lycos?) when they stagnated and Google came out of nowhere and reinvented (in some sense) the search business. When Google emerged, everyone thought that search was dead. So it isn’t that it can’t happen, it’s just really hard for it to happen.
I’d love to hear the gory details of what happened at Wamily and why the folks there think it happened the way it did. This would probably make a really good presentation for one of the events in town. I know, it sounds like rubbernecking at a car wreck but you can often learn a lot more from a failure than you can from a success. If anyone hears of this getting set up, let me know. I’d love to attend.
The founder took a real job in SF. He is actively working on Skribit in his spare time.
Well, I guess that means we probably won’t get a presentation on the challenges that did Wamily in. Too bad. Would have been interesting.
It really was hard for me to take Wamily offline … I have been resisting it for months … but when I logged in the other day for the first time in weeks to my own startup, I finally realized that it was time to cut my losses. I silently took down the site and put up the “That’s all …” message on Wednesday night. I was wondering how long it would take for somebody to notice.
Yes, as Lance pointed out, I recently moved to San Francisco to take on a real job … in other words I needed to, make some money. I had enough of Atlanta, being a resident there for over 8 years … I couldn’t see myself settling down, so when the time came to call it quits on the startup, it wasn’t hard to find an acceptable gig in the Bay area.
Wamily had a handful of problems that ultimately led to its demise … but the biggest blocker was lack of commitment from the team and co-founder. Wamily started as an idea over a late night phone call with myself and an old college friend … after a bit of tinkering and prototyping, we decided to take a shot at turning it into a full-fledged startup. It began as a nights & weekends project for both of us, but as more and more work needed to be done, I quickly realized that success would not visit us unless a full-time commitment was made. Said co-founder didn’t feel the same way, and failed to dedicate himself to an “always on” garage startup culture.
For many months, my own determination and passion drove me forward with Wamily, despite lacking contribution from the co-founder and the small part-time team that we recruited. At one point, we were 5 people working in 5 different cities scattered across the Eastern time zone. I put in many, many hours late at night, hacking away, determined to prove all the naysayers wrong. That group of five slowly whittled down to four … three … two.
At that point, over a year after the first line of code was written, came the ultimatum from me to my partner: commit or quit. He chose the latter and Wamily was officially dead. Like everyone had said, it’s the people behind the startup that matter more than the startup itself. In this case, we didn’t have the dedication or teamwork to back our idea.
So, Wamily is offline now for who-knows-how-long. Right now, co-founder and I are trying to negotiate some sort of equitable redistribution of ownership so that I can eventually clean up the code and try to extract some value out of it in some way. In retrospect, I foolishly agreed to a 50/50 ownership distribution in the beginning, despite the fact that it was clear that as the technical guy, I would be doing much more than 50% of the work. I’m also working hard at my new “real job” and dabbling in a few other web projects, namely Skribit and FindBiodiesel.org.
And I don’t really miss Atlanta yet. But say hi to everyone for me.
Nate Clark
(Former) Wamily Co-founder
While I am a new person to this whole field of startups and have very limited knowledge on the topic, I would like to ask if lack of committment was the major factor to its demise or was the idea that not many folks knew you had a need of help also a big factor?
I am sorry if that question does not make sense, I just wonder if the knowledge of your need to have folks to work on it with you was important in it.
If you ever do decide to bring it back up, I would love to know so that I can post about it. I realize I am a relative newcomer to this whole business, but I have learned from being part of the Save Jericho Campaign that pushing your ideas 24/7 does in fact work and I would love to do that as a post at my blog for you
I hope your doing great in your new venture
:-)