Blurtt
The business, the turning points, and the decisions behind them.
01 / WHAT IT BUILT
What the company did
Blurtt was a mobile communication app founded by former Wall Street financier Jeanette Cajide. It let users search the web for an image, add up to 100 characters of text, and share the result - a 'blurtt' - with friends or anonymously via text, email, Twitter and Facebook. The startup began in 2009 as a postcard platform, pivoted several times, and relaunched as an iOS app in March 2012 with the ambition of making 'blurtt' a verb like tweet. It shut down in 2014.
02 / Blurtt FAILURE REASONS
Failure reasons
Blurtt never found revenue or sustainable funding across its multiple incarnations. It came close to closing a seed round of nearly $1 million, but the deal collapsed when the founder had a falling out with the lead investor over who would run the company and what team would build it. Only $120,000 was raised from friends and family - enough for an MVP and an iOS launch, but not enough to sustain the business. By September 2012 it was clear Blurtt would be a losing business, and the founder gave herself a year to try to save it before shutting it down in 2014 and putting the assets up for sale.
03 / EVENT HISTORY
Events in the structured record
- Operations ended
Blurtt ended operations.
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
Blurtt began in 2009 as a web and mobile postcard platform, then pivoted in 2010 to ad-supported free mailed postcards, but attracted no ad partners while fixed costs accumulated.
- 02
2011 was spent mostly fundraising: the company joined Archimedes Labs' acceleration program and nearly closed a seed round of nearly $1 million before the deal collapsed over disagreements with the lead investor.
- 03
With $120,000 raised from friends and family, the team launched the Blurtt iOS app on March 21, 2012, letting users overlay text on images and share them anonymously or with their network.
- 04
By September 2012 the business was clearly losing money; in February 2014 the founder announced the startup was dead and put all its assets up for sale.
- 05
No reliable realized loss figure with clear subject, period and basis has been disclosed.