Nouncer
The business, the turning points, and the decisions behind them.
01 / WHAT IT BUILT
What the company did
Nouncer was an online hub for real-time newswires. Founded in 2006 in New York by Eran Hammer-Lahav, it aggregated news into a real-time, social reading experience, letting users discover and discuss what was happening right now. It never got past its friends-and-family funding round: in 2008 Hammer-Lahav pulled the plug and the startup shut down.
02 / Nouncer FAILURE REASONS
Failure reasons
In his public post-mortem, founder Eran Hammer-Lahav explained that he pulled the plug midway through the friends-and-family round for a host of reasons touching on hiring, competition, and product development/management. The product never found its market — as one startup post-mortem put it, the product did not have a compelling enough hook to attract and keep readers. Hammer-Lahav moved on to become an Open Standards Evangelist at Yahoo!.
03 / EVENT HISTORY
Events in the structured record
- Founded
Eran Hammer-Lahav founded Nouncer in New York as a real-time newswire hub — an online home for aggregating and discussing news in real time.
- Shut down
Hammer-Lahav pulled the plug on Nouncer midway through the friends-and-family funding round; he later shared the lessons learned in a widely-discussed post-mortem and moved on to Yahoo!.
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
In 2008, founder Eran Hammer-Lahav pulled the plug on Nouncer and shut the service down.
- 02
He shared a post-mortem of the failure and moved on to become an Open Standards Evangelist at Yahoo!.