SingleStat.us
The business, the turning points, and the decisions behind them.
01 / WHAT IT BUILT
What the company did
SingleStat.us was a weekend project by engineer David Weekly, founder of the SuperHappyDevHouse coding events. Built in a day on June 4, 2006, the site let visitors look up the relationship status of any MySpace user and receive email alerts whenever it changed - effectively a 'breakup notifier' for the MySpace era. It was never a real company, just a fun hack that exploded in popularity overnight.
02 / SingleStat.us FAILURE REASONS
Failure reasons
SingleStat.us died of platform dependence: it scraped MySpace with automated scripts, and MySpace's lawyers sent David Weekly a cease-and-desist letter on June 15, 2006, demanding he take the site down, claiming the scripts violated MySpace's terms of use and placed an undue burden on its servers. The one-man project had no way to fight back and shut down - 11 days after launch.
03 / EVENT HISTORY
Events in the structured record
- Weekend build and launch
David Weekly builds SingleStat.us in a single day (June 4, 2006) at his SuperHappyDevHouse #10 coding event; the site lets users track MySpace relationship statuses by email. TechCrunch covers it the next day and it takes off overnight.
- Cease and desist, shutdown
On June 15, 2006, MySpace's lawyers send Weekly a cease-and-desist letter demanding the site be taken down for violating the terms of use with automated scripts. He complies; SingleStat.us enters the TechCrunch DeadPool 11 days after launch - 'the shortest web 2.0 dot-com ever.'
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
SingleStat.us was a one-person weekend project with no venture funding.
- 02
MySpace's cease-and-desist letter of June 15, 2006 forced the site offline 11 days after launch.
- 03
No money changed hands and no loss figure exists to report.