Fobo
The business, the turning points, and the decisions behind them.
01 / WHAT IT BUILT
What the company did
FOBO was a mobile marketplace for selling consumer electronics locally. Launched in San Francisco in January 2014, the app instantly priced a listed item, usually off the average eBay sale price, then ran a roughly 97-minute auction among nearby users; if the item did not sell, FOBO bought it itself at the guaranteed starting price. In a 1,000-person beta it sold 92 percent of listed items.
02 / Fobo FAILURE REASONS
Failure factors
FOBO was only an incrementally better selling experience vs alternatives; most people stuck with prior habits, so the marketplace did not achieve differentiated traction.
only incrementally better than Gazelle/Craigslist/eBay paths.
Helped a few thousand sellers; rest stuck with prior behavior.
03 / EVENT HISTORY
Events in the structured record
- Product or service closed
FOBO 'faded off'; users told to settle pending sales/earnings—product/service wind-down. (Later Oct 2015 Gone asset/acquihire news is separate; 2014 fade is the sourced ending.)
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
FOBO raised a $1.6 million seed round in October 2012 from investors including Y Combinator, Chris Sacca, Kevin Rose and Tim Ferriss, followed by an undisclosed venture round from FundersClub in April 2014.
- 02
The product was shut down in 2014.
- 03
No reliable loss figure with a clear subject, period and basis exists, so no loss amount is recorded.