AskTina
The business, the turning points, and the decisions behind them.
01 / WHAT IT BUILT
What the company did
AskTina (ASKTINA LIMITED) was a London blog-monetization startup founded in 2016 by Tom Hunt, who had previously built and sold the online marketplace Virtual Valley. Its product was a live video chat widget that experts could install on their blogs, letting readers place live pay-per-minute video calls to the expert's mobile phone through the AskTina app — a way for experts to earn money for sharing advice. It went through an accelerator in September 2016 and raised about $22,400.
02 / AskTina FAILURE REASONS
Failure reasons
AskTina failed because it did not validate the idea before building. After six months building the MVP, 35 experts had installed the widget and it had accumulated 10,000 page loads — but zero paid calls were placed through the software. People simply did not want to place paid, live video calls to experts they followed; they were happy with asynchronous communication through written or video content. Founder Tom Hunt killed the project, and the company was dissolved in September 2018.
03 / EVENT HISTORY
Events in the structured record
- Product or service closed
In a 17 March 2018 Failory interview, UK founder Tom Hunt said AskTina (live paid video-chat widget for blog experts) was killed after an MVP with 35 experts and 10,000 widget page loads produced zero paid calls. He did not publish a separate calendar shutdown date beyond that post-mortem.
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
AskTina built an MVP of a live video chat widget over six months; 35 experts installed it on their blogs and the widget accumulated 10,000 page loads — but zero paid calls were placed, the objective data Hunt needed to judge the idea.
- 02
With the core insight that people simply did not want paid, live video calls to experts, Hunt shut down the project.
- 03
ASKTINA LIMITED (incorporated August 22, 2016) was dissolved on September 11, 2018 via voluntary strike-off.