Anatomy Of A Failure: Lessons Learned

This post was written by guest contributor Paul Bragiel , founder of Meetro , a location-aware instant messaging platform that was DeadPooled last month. Bragiel is also the founder hosted forum solution Lefora . See our coverage of these two companies here , along with our first post on Meetro in August 2005 . Also see our post titled What To Do With Failed Startup IP? . In the spirit of openness, I write this post on what we did wrong at Meetro - a post mortem of sorts. You don’t see this often enough in the startup world even though the majority of startups go belly-up. Hell, there are probably a few today that will go away with a whimper. So much knowledge is lost. If you’ve had similar experiences, I encourage you to share them over at Lefora . To those of you not familiar with Meetro, we were one of the first location-based social networks. We figured out where you were physically and then we would tell you else was around you in real-time. You would then be able to instant message with them, check out their profiles, and hopefully meet up. Other functionality included telling you about restaurants close by, media created nearby, and various local information that pertained to your location. We also supported all your various instant messaging protocols (AIM, MSN, Yahoo) and a slew of other social features. Even with a robust product we simply couldn’t capture enough market share. So here are the major problems we had that, in the end, we couldn’t overcome. There were, of course, mini fires and random things but every startup goes through those. I have a feeling some of the other location-based startups out there right now are experiencing the same things. Most importantly, there was a “location problem”. It’s really hard to grow a product that’s 100% focused on where you physically are. Tons of companies have tried this before and most of them have died. We, of course, were cocky and had to give it a try. There was just something so sexy about the idea that you could load up a piece of software and it would tell you about someone nearby who was interesting to you. Someone will crack this and make billions of dollars on it. I can only hope to be involved in some shape or form, since it’s an itch that hasn’t gone away for me. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.