Kiko
The business, the turning points, and the decisions behind them.
01 / WHAT IT BUILT
What the company did
Kiko was a Web 2.0 online calendar startup founded by Justin Kan and Emmett Shear (later the founders of Justin.tv and Twitch) as part of Y Combinator's first class in 2005. It offered a web-based calendar app built on Ruby on Rails in a crowded space that was about to be dominated by Google Calendar.
02 / Kiko FAILURE REASONS
Failure reasons
Kiko failed in an intensely competitive online-calendar market made harsher by Google Calendar's arrival; it never found product-market fit (neither founder used calendars themselves and they never talked to calendar users during development, as co-founder Emmett Shear later admitted); and the founders chose a fast, simple exit to move on to new projects that became Justin.tv.
03 / EVENT HISTORY
Events in the structured record
- Asset sale
16 Aug 2006: YC calendar Kiko.com decided to call it quits and put the site up for eBay auction with account export/delete; later sold (Tucows).
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
In August 2006 Kiko listed itself on eBay with a minimum bid of just under $50,000.
- 02
On August 26, 2006 Tucows won the eBay auction for about $250,000 and acquired Kiko's code and domain to add calendar functionality to its email platform.
- 03
The sale matched the record's asset_sale classification for 2006; no audited loss figure was disclosed.