Biographicon
The business, the turning points, and the decisions behind them.
01 / WHAT IT BUILT
What the company did
Biographicon was a Y Combinator-backed startup founded by CEO Ethan Herdrick and CTO Daniel Terhorst, launched on March 1, 2008. It was a wiki-based website containing biographies of famous and non-famous people - pitched as 'Wikipedia for the non-notable masses', since Wikipedia's notability threshold kept most people out. Its tagline was 'all the people of the world': anyone could be included, anyone could edit any page, and the site also mapped connections between individuals. On August 21, 2008 the site was shut down for what the founders called 'insufficient user interest'; a brief attempt to restore it soon after failed.
02 / Biographicon FAILURE REASONS
Failure factors supported by the current evidence
Wikipedia's Biographicon article states the Y Combinator-backed biography wiki was shut down on 21 August 2008 because the founders called there 'insufficient user interest in the site.'; a brief restore attempt failed.
Wikipedia reports the founders attributed shutdown to insufficient user interest in the site.
03 / EVENT HISTORY
Events in the structured record
- Product or service closed
Wikipedia states Biographicon existed from March to August 2008 and that the site was shut down on 21 August 2008; a brief attempt to restore it afterward was unsuccessful.
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
Cold-start kills wikis: nobody enters biographies into an empty wiki, and an empty wiki attracts nobody.
- 02
Removing a barrier is not a value proposition: 'no notability threshold' solved Wikipedia's rejection problem but not anyone's real need.
- 03
Traction is the only milestone that matters: TechCrunch's launch-day verdict was right - six months later the site was gone.
- 04
Compete with the incumbent, not its reject pile: people wanted to be on Wikipedia; a consolation prize had no pull.
- 05
Kill fast when interest dies: the founders shut down in five months rather than flogging a dead site.