photo credit: Tony the Misfit
TechCrunch ran an interesting post-mortem article yesterday by the founder of Meetro, a location-aware instant messaging platform, that recently closed its doors.
Meetro’s idea was to let users download an application onto their wifi-enabled mobile phones that would then allow them to find other Meetro users nearby to chat with.
Paul Bragiel, the founder, cited the following reasons for the start-up’s demise:
- The location problem: the service only became interesting if there were other users nearby. Critical mass gained in one geography didn’t help in other geographies.
- The realtime problem: the service would only connect users who happened to be online at the same time. Multiplied by the location problem, this severely reduced the chances of finding other Meetro users nearby.
- The download problem: the service required an app to be downloaded and installed on a user’s mobile phone. Most people were not interested in doing that.
It’s good to see that StreetSize and Localmouth each only suffer from one of these three problems :-)
Leave a Reply