Back to the drawing board.

I’m really happy Meeet’s kickstarter didn’t go through.

Meeet took us two tries to launch. We went through two stages of landing pages. The first received only 500 sign ups. The second received over 5,000. It was the top post on Designer News, it kept to the top of Product Hunt and we did an AMA. After a rocky beta launch, we struggled with keeping up with our servers and with paying the bills. We were forking over a couple hundred dollars a month just to stay afloat and we were running out of money — spending this much on Meeet wasn’t something we were prepared to do. So we turned our focus towards raising money, like a start up might do.

Once we launched our Kickstarter, we basically flatlined.

We stopped focusing on developing, on changing basic site interactions, on refining our product in favor of flashier funding related projects. We were productively procrastinating and our excuse was always Kickstarter.

We’re going back to basics.

We’re trimming down our product offerings. Our first step will be building in a quick little link to your Twitter account, closely followed by removing our entire chat interface. It’s frustrating and didn’t get the love it needed, mainly because we were so focused on doing unfocused work on building our network and raising money. Instead, we’re going to focus on giving our product and the experience we aim to provide all of our time. That may mean we don’t have sweet tee shirts, that may mean we don’t get new stickers for a while, but it won’t be the end of Meeet.