dotblu
The business, the turning points, and the decisions behind them.
01 / WHAT IT BUILT
What the company did
DotBlu began as BluBet, a service for making online bets, and later changed its name and focus to social gaming.
02 / dotblu FAILURE REASONS
Failure reasons
DotBlu started as BluBet, a fake-money betting site, and morphed into the social gaming community DotBlu, raising $2 million from D.E. Shaw and Maple Investments on top of a $225,000 seed round from investors including YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim. The concept simply was not working out: the company discontinued operations on October 16, 2009 and used its remaining cash to pivot into a third incarnation, the daily-deals site TownHog.
03 / EVENT HISTORY
Events in the structured record
- Operations ended
Social-media company DotBlu stopped operating in October 2009.
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 company discontinued the DotBlu service on October 16, 2009.
- 02
Remaining funds were used to pivot into TownHog, a daily-deals site for local businesses launched later in 2009.
- 03
TownHog was acquired by group-buying site BuyWithMe in September 2011 for undisclosed terms.
- 04
No creditor settlement or loss disclosure was published for the DotBlu shutdown.