Mixed Media Labs
The business, the turning points, and the decisions behind them.
01 / WHAT IT BUILT
What the company did
Mixed Media Labs was a San Francisco mobile software company founded in January 2010 by Dalton Caldwell and Bryan Berg as part of Y Combinator's Winter 2010 batch. It built three products: PicPlz, a mobile photo-sharing app with filters that launched before Instagram's rise; an unnamed Facebook-platform app discovery tool that was killed by the platform before launch; and App.net, a subscription-based, ad-free social network crowdfunded with more than $750,000 from 11,000 backers. None survived — PicPlz shut down in July 2012, and App.net — and with it Mixed Media Labs — closed in March 2017 after failing to attract enough paying subscribers.
02 / Mixed Media Labs FAILURE REASONS
Failure reasons
Mixed Media Labs failed through a compounding sequence of platform dependency traps and a business model the market would not support. PicPlz lost the photo-sharing market to Instagram despite launching first. The Facebook app-discovery product was killed before launch by the very platform it depended on. App.net, conceived as a principled escape from platform gatekeeping, could never attract enough paying subscribers to sustain itself against free incumbents — it shut down citing an inability to generate meaningful revenue.
03 / EVENT HISTORY
Events in the structured record
- Company founded
Dalton Caldwell and Bryan Berg found Mixed Media Labs in San Francisco as part of Y Combinator's Winter 2010 batch; PicPlz launches as a photo-sharing app.
- PicPlz shutdown
PicPlz shuts down on July 3, 2012, losing to Instagram; the team spins PicPlz off and focuses on the new venture App.net.
- App.net launches
App.net launches as a subscription-based, ad-free social network, crowdfunding more than $750,000 from 11,000 backers.
- App.net shutdown
App.net shuts down on March 14, 2017, citing inability to generate meaningful revenue; it open-sources its code; Mixed Media Labs closes with it.
04 / CONTEMPORARY REBUILD ASSESSMENT
Difficulty of rebuilding this project today
Material for this section is being gathered and checked. It will appear here once ready.
Overall assessment: Not completed
05 / CAUSAL CHAIN
How the factors connect
- 01
App.net crowdfunded more than $750,000 from 11,000 backers in 2012 to stay independent of venture funding.
- 02
PicPlz's investors never recouped: the photo-sharing bet was lost to Instagram and the company pivoted to App.net, whose subscription model could not generate meaningful revenue; no realized loss figure with disclosed subject, period and basis was found.