Unwinding Yarn
Today we are announcing that our startup, Yarn, will be shutting down.
Several months ago, we set out to create a product that would effortlessly bring personal photo collections to life for Yarn users to discover, remember and share. As a team we believe deeply in the power of personal photos to add richness and texture to life.
We’re immensely proud of what we built, and delighted to have delivered so many treasured memories to our users. However, what we built was just the starting point; in order to evolve and improve Yarn we needed additional funding that we energetically pursued. We’ve now run out of time, and must make the wrenching decision to bring our efforts to a close.
It has been a privilege to work with the amazing people who joined the Yarn team. What follows is a little background about how we worked together over the last 16 months.
Building the Yarn Team
Yarn is my 6th startup. While there have been some common threads across all of them, each company has had its own unique journey while hiring the team, discovering product-market fit, managing a gazillion implementation decisions and acquiring customers. At the end of the day it is all about the team that takes the journey — their curiosity, skills, passion for the problem, data-minded thinking, fortitude when faced with obstacles and ultimately kindness with each other. The Yarn team fulfilled that whole spectrum.
The Yarn Journey
In 2014 I was eager to work on the big problem of consumers drowning in the ever rising number of personal photos. The social photo era makes sharing so easy, but not discovering and remembering in your own photo collection. I was so pleased when the executive team at Samsung Accelerator invited me to join and assemble a team to create the solution. When I visited the accelerator for the first time, I just knew I was going to work there from the moment I walked through the door.
I am ever grateful to the amazing people who joined me. Recruiting in NYC was quite a task, but it was super clear on the first meeting with each person — these were Yarn peeps! They are super skilled, love photos, understand and feel the depth of the personal photo problem, and are such great human beings.
Yarn Photo Cloud & Memory Machine
From the very beginning we built our photo cloud services on AWS and knew that we needed AI techniques in the background, silently working on behalf of users. We dubbed that the Yarn Memory Machine. Our design ethos guided each step as we iterated on countless ways to employ smart computer vision and machine learning methods to distill “experiences” out of an ocean of consumer photos. Further we wanted Yarn to learn from users interacting with their photos as a way to provide organization as a by-product. We had users with as few as 500 photos all the way up to 60,000 each.
Finding the Product
The team iterated swiftly on several ideas based on what we learned from hundreds of consumer research hours and building prototypes. There is just nothing like a clickable prototype and the customer development process to begin to shape the path.
Were we going to use a card UX or a Feed? What would provide the greatest opportunity for engagement, delight, surprise, and emotion? In the end we settled on a Feed structure because it had a more continuous quality that seemed to support a dream-like walk through your memories. It seems to suit nostalgia best.
Product performance
Within our first 11 months we had so much to celebrate: iOS and Android mobile apps, a solid and scalable photo cloud service, the Yarn Memory Machine, a Webapp, and desktop uploaders for Mac & PC.
What was most gratifying was that we had found our sticky feature and users couldn’t stop clicking to “Get New Yarn”. In fact, over 50% of users would request on-demand to get up to 5 more photo collages per session, and spend about 2–3 minutes time in app. Over 60% of users were coming back up to 4 times per week and 23% every day. Our 30–60–90 day retention numbers were tracking in the top 160 consumer apps in the PlayStore. Sweet! Or perhaps bittersweet, given our end.
GTD Team
We operated as a “getting things done” team. My personal favorite time is always group “app attacks” where we all exercise the iOS and Android apps for bugs or feature issues. Lots of serious conversations and much soul searching goes on at these times. With our eyes constantly on making improvements, these could be very hard indeed. But in the end our common goal held us creatively together.
New beginnings
There is something so great when a baby is born during the birth of a product. Andy Stanberry’s family grew by a beautiful new baby boy early in our development. I always consider my team’s family as part of the whole team. In startups there are no boundaries when you are pondering and creating solutions to difficult problems. Everyone went on this journey with us.
Yarn Team Fun
We had a lot of fun too going out together and celebrating each new milestone that we had set out for ourselves. All of our achievements represent a great deal of focused thinking, skilled development, obstacles overcome, constant testing, as well as deciphering many user signals that at times just simply baffled us.
Samsung Accelerator
Many thanks go out to Samsung Accelerator for their investment, encouragement and support through the early stages of creating Yarn. We would not not be here without you and the way that you celebrated all our successes along the way!
Thank you!
Thank you Yarn team present and past! Not everyone got to the end of this journey, but each and every person made a contribution along the way towards building something engaging, personal and important for the future of photos. You are all appreciated!
Just a few more photos …
