Companies, like visitors of Chinese take-away restaurants, come and go. Today, we have the unfortunate duty to report that two fine young Internet startups have not survived the never-ending battle for users, relevance and dollars that rages Web-wide.
Making its way to the deadpool are JamLegend, which aimed to compete against Rock Band and Guitar Hero with an interesting online music game, and Skribit, which hoped to help out poor bloggers and website owners suffering from writer’s block.
JamLegend was one of the most promising startups to come out of the LaunchBox incubator back in 2008, and quickly attracted 1 million members (and has grown on to about 2 million registered users over the years).
As of yesterday, the following features were turned off: new user registrations, new artist registrations, JamCash deposits, new VIP subscriptions, and VIP subscription extensions. On April 29, the service will be completely shut down and all user data deleted.
Why, you ask? Well, according to a blog post, the team is moving on to unknown new ventures after three years of trying to make JamLegend rock the market.
JamLegend had raised more than $2 million in funding, in part from one of its advisors, entrepreneur Hadi Partovi, cofounder of Tellme and iLike and former Myspace exec.
Skribit was an interesting idea as well, although it enjoyed much less traction than JamLegend, as the above tweet shows. Skribit originally came out of the Atlanta Startup Weekend organized in November 2007.
The service aimed to help prevent writer’s block by allowing bloggers and website publishers to get post suggestions straight from their readers, while at the same time helping readers keep track of what their favorite bloggers were cooking.
This is the email the startup sent its users today:
[Notice: This is the last email you’ll ever receive regarding Skribit. I will personally nuke the 20,621 user email list. – @Stammy]
On July 31st, 2011, Skribit will be closing its doors. Skribit started several years ago at Atlanta Startup Weekend in November 2007 and has had a good run. As a refresher, Skribit aimed to aid writer’s block by allowing bloggers to receive post suggestions from their readers, while helping readers keep track of what their favorite blogger’s were working on.
Unfortunately, Skribit traction was not as impressive as we had hoped and Skribit had become more of a niche solution for a small percentage of bloggers. Over the past few years, 45,162 blog post suggestions have been completed through Skribit, 2,346 of which were completed/blogged. The vast majority of Skribit users did not receive suggestions from their readers for various reasons.
Only 1,214 blogs had more than 3 active suggestions.
We stopped actively developing Skribit last Spring and decided to pursue other opportunities. Thanks for being part of Skribit! We are in the process of refunding current PRO users. We wouldn’t have been able to keep Skribit running for so long if it wasn’t for a seed investment from Georgia Tech’s Edison Fund and lots of advising from Lance Weatherby of the Georgia Tech ATDC.
Follow us on Twitter to see what we’re working on now!
Best,
Calvin, Paul & Lance