Batch
The business, the turning points, and the decisions behind them.
01 / WHAT IT BUILT
What the company did
Batch was an iOS photo-sharing app that grouped photos from an event into batches for sharing.
02 / Batch FAILURE REASONS
Failure reasons
Batch was the last act of a company that had already pivoted once. DailyBooth, a Y Combinator 2009 company, had been one of the early webcam photo communities, but by early 2011 active development had shifted entirely to Batch - a new mobile product for sharing groups of photos. Batch launched into an already crowded photo-sharing arena in 2011 and never gained the traction to stand apart. In July 2012 the company accepted a soft landing: Airbnb acqui-hired CEO Brian Pokorny and the design and engineering team in a talent deal that bought no technology and no apps. With development halted and the team building Airbnb's mobile products instead, Batch's shutdown on October 31, 2012 was a formality.
03 / EVENT HISTORY
Events in the structured record
- Photo service closed
On 31 October 2012 Batch told users the service was closing and to download photos before deletion on 8 November. Its team had moved to Airbnb after an acquisition.
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
DailyBooth had raised $6 million from Ignition Partners, Sequoia Capital, Betaworks, True Ventures, SV Angel and other angels.
- 02
In July 2012 Airbnb acqui-hired the Batch/DailyBooth team - the CEO and design/engineering staff - in a talent-only deal; the apps were kept running but all development stopped.
- 03
On October 31, 2012 Batch announced it was shutting down, with photos available for download through November 8, 2012.
- 04
No loss figure with a stated subject, period and accounting basis has been publicly documented; the acqui-hire terms were never disclosed.