eCrowds
The business, the turning points, and the decisions behind them.
01 / WHAT IT BUILT
What the company did
eCrowds was a short-lived startup that introduced an advanced web content management platform in November 2008. The product was designed to help content management teams easily manage their digital assets and run live, public websites on top of the platform.
02 / eCrowds FAILURE REASONS
Failure reasons
eCrowds failed because it built the product for itself instead of for customers. The team spent too long building without getting feedback from real prospects — founder David Cummings later advised against going more than two or three months without putting the product in front of objective users — so the system ended up with a UI too complex and unwieldy for new users, who churned on the steep learning curve. As complexity grew, performance degraded badly for a product meant to run live public websites; the team spent hundreds of hours trying to speed up the app with little success, having never built benchmarking tools into the development cycle. The company closed in the summer of 2010.
03 / EVENT HISTORY
Events in the structured record
- Product or service closed
The founder confirmed that the eCrowds content-management product was shut down; the precise closure date remains unconfirmed.
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
The eCrowds product was shut down in the summer of 2010.
- 02
Founder David Cummings published a post-mortem, 'Post Mortem on a Failed Product,' documenting the lessons on user testing and performance benchmarking.