What Went Wrong At Backfence?

Mark Potts knows, but won't say. Or more accurately, the cofounder of the community website network, which burnt $3 million in less than two years before folding this summer, won't give up the good stuff. He's citing "private business matters involved that we've chosen not to discuss." Yet he's happy to post about general lessons learned on his Recovering Journalist blog. A lot of this is boilerplate that could apply to any new business - startups are hard, keep costs down - and some is pretty much Web 2.0 cant at this point - it's a conversation, engage your community - but still worth reading. One promising note for any community-oriented, ad-supported startups out there - Potts says selling ads wasn't really a problem. But just for argument's sake, if we really are embracing communities here, and we really are in an age of transparency, I look forward to reading postmortems from SAS Investors, Omidyar Networks and other investors who sunk money into the venture. Anyone?

Comments

[Jane]

Henry,

I know the Backfence founders pretty well--and I'd pin the pathology of their demise on a common start-up disease: the inability to listen to outside advice. In other words, chalk this one up to management weakness rather than a lack of market opportunity. (I'm posting this message not for vindictive reasons, but rather to help them take stock and do better the next time). In Susan's (one of the co-founders) previous venture that involved creating a woman focused community site, she ignored the advice to to follow the hipper/more upbeat/fun tonality of Oxygen and iVillage, and instead stuck with her serious WomensConnectOnline.com site that was clunky, boring, and far too narrow. Somehow she was smarter than all of the people that were trying to help her, while her company was losing the investor's money. With Backfence she and her partner continued the pattern, not realizing that start-ups need to learn and adjust, and often the best ideas originate from outside the company's walls.

The best entrepreneurs are synthesizers of the idea pool that's available them. Unfortunately Backfence's tombstone reads "They Didn't Listen".