Social bookmarking site for recipes, Yumm.com, has hit the deadpool. A note on the website thanks users for their input but says the numbers no longer stack up for operating as a business.
An email to registered users notes they are able to export saved recipes to their bookmarks folder or other bookmarking service, while business assets are being auctioned to pay back seed investors.
“It was a fun ride, I learned a lot, and I can honestly say thousands of people enjoyed and used the service. In the end, we just ran out of money and it turns out I can’t feed my kids on the goodwill of thousands of users,” founder Chris Hedgecock tells TechCrunch.
“I still believe in the concepts, we just didn’t have the resources to execute on an engineering and growth level. Onward and upward to the next project.”
Yumm.com was founded back in 2010, and had raised a $50,000 angel round in 2011. We covered the site in its early days — describing it as a “great tool” for people wanting to aggregate recipes from multiple website services, rather than having to sign into lots of different services.
Also launched in 2010: Pinterest, one of those rare startups that’s attained unicorn status — raising more than $1 billion in funding, and valued at $5 billion this time last year. So while Yumm.com was undoubtedly onto something with its online aggregator tool for saving and sharing food-related content, Pinterest is the clear category winner here — gobbling up many a niche social bookmarking service’s lunch.
“Their product offering was much more robust than ours. We launched first, but they just did it better. The concept of grouping, in particular, was key,” says Hedgecock.
“Their simple implementation of boards was something we really missed and they did really well. There were tons of similarities, the scraping of minimal info from the target page, the image selection, the javascript bookmarklet, but in the end they got traction and we didn’t.”