Why Seesmic Failed

Some time ago my company launched a video micro blogging service called Hictu. In the same period pal Loic Le Meur launched Seesmic, a service pretty much similar to what Hictu was trying to achieve.

The main idea was: lets people post short videos and let other people respond with other videos, starting a video thread or discussing a post or an article thanks to the ability to post video comments.

We started Hictu in Italy and promoted it not that much. I also presented it in various events in Silicon Valley. People very excited, cool service, but the usage was very low  and the growth pretty much not significant. For us it was a side project. One-two people involved, investments pretty much close to zero.

Loic did better since he was focusing on it. Moved to San Francisco, got over $12M in funding, a lot of buzz and he was supported by many important names in Silicon Valley (from Michael Arrington to Robert Scoble). Now he announced they are putting the video micro blogging service on hold and focusing on the development of their Twitter client (acquired some months ago, previously Twhirl).

What do I get from this story?

1) People don’t like using video for video conversation

Recording a video takes time. There are more people who consume videos than those who record them. A smaller percentage of the latter group records videos of themselves for various purposes. An insignificant percentage of them used Seesmic or Hictu. The reson is that it takes time, people are shy, sometimes you need to record it more than once, you need privacy and so on. Let’s say it is not plug and play and, in most cases, the value added on top of a normal text message is not that high.

2) People don’t like using video communication

In Italy as well as in other countries like UK 3G mobile video calls failed. Just a tiny percentage of users used it and just for specific purposes (grandparents to see their grandsons etc.). This should have been an alert for those developing services around video communication (not broadcasting, I mean one-to-one or one-to-many communication).

The case of Seesmic is even more interesting. I don’t think other people than Loic could have raised such amount of money for a service like that. Loic is a public figure, famous for his previous successful deals as well as for the conference he founded and runs, LaWeb. There are, in my opinion, more interesting and innovative ideas that deserve more money than what actually get. But, at the end of the day, he succeeded in getting that money and it will be very interesting to watch how Loic will justify the upcoming expenses to develop and manage a Twitter client and, more important, to monetize it properly. In any case, Loic deserves our praises to not keep pushing a service that is likely going to fail.

It would also be interesting to ask Tweetie’s and Tweetdeck’s founders what they would do with such huge amount of money, other than paying their bills and keep improving their app until they run out of funds…. Comments welcome!

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Tagged as: Loïc Le Meur, luca filigheddu, micro video blogging, seesmic, Silicon Valley, TweetDeck, Twhirl, Twitter