cruxy
The business, the turning points, and the decisions behind them.
01 / WHAT IT BUILT
What the company did
Cruxy was a Brooklyn-based startup founded by Nathan Freitas, Jon Oakes, and Will Meyer that built a widget-based commerce platform for artists and sellers. One of the first companies to fully embrace Amazon's cloud, it offered an embeddable commerce system - widgets artists could place on their own pages to sell downloads directly - with a cloud-based business model that worked from day one. The company was 100 percent built and funded by a very small, passionate team, with its technology platform built by Meyer. It served top artists and sellers who brought traffic and business to the site, making final payouts to them when it wound down.
02 / cruxy FAILURE REASONS
Failure reasons
Cruxy failed because it could not scale to a viable volume, and because its founders could not give it full-time commitment. Despite a cloud-based business model that 'made sense and worked', the company never reached enough volume for the team to make an actual living from it - not needed or used by enough people. With none of the cofounders able to commit the time the site needed anymore, maintaining the high level of service was no longer possible. Nathan Freitas wrote that it was no longer fair to artists or customers to represent the site as open for business when it barely was; the team chose an orderly wind-down, stopping purchases on March 18 and shutting down the service on April 1, 2009, making all final payouts to sellers.
03 / EVENT HISTORY
Events in the structured record
- Operating
Nathan Freitas, Jon Oakes, and Will Meyer ran Cruxy in Brooklyn, with its widget-based commerce platform live for artists and sellers.
- Shut down
On March 11, 2009 Freitas wrote to top artists and sellers: purchases would stop on March 18 and the service would shut down on April 1, 2009; all final payouts were made.
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 Brooklyn startup founded by Nathan Freitas, Jon Oakes and Will Meyer built embedded cloud-commerce tools for musicians and was among the earliest adopters of Amazon's cloud.
- 02
It stopped purchases in March 2009 and shut down the service on April 1, 2009, winding down in an orderly fashion after settling with its artists.
- 03
No audited loss figure was publicly disclosed; the self-funded team raised no outside financing.