Some modifications on the high of Timehop, the quirky app that presentations you reminders of photos and different content that you simply’ve taken and posted on fb, Twitter, Foursquare, Instagram and Flickr or from your digicam roll. TechCrunch has discovered and demonstrated that Jon Wegener, who co-founded the company with Benny Wong, has stepped down as CEO. He has been replaced with the aid of Matt Raoul, who had been Timehop’s design lead. also, Rick Webb, who had been VP of monetization and an early investor in the app, is now the startup’s COO.
We had been first instructed about the CEO exchange by using an anonymous tipster, who claimed the changes were made after an app replace in December bombed with users. while we have been discovering some proof of the brand new roles, Wegener spoke back to a request for remark confirming his departure and the COO appointment.
“There’s an excellent group in place, and the company is successful and healthy,” Wegener wrote.
Webb also spoke back in an instant to say he had been consulting at Timehop for the last year “building out the revenue aspect”. He also cited that the corporate is “on track to be permanently cash drift positive by March, with a mixture of direct and programmatic advert sales.”
“we might additionally like to place to rest any issues that Russia was involved in this transfer of power. It has been totally peaceful and democratic,” he introduced.
Neither he nor Webb (nor a board member that we contacted) have answered our questions but about what position (if any) Wegener could have at Timehop with the CEO exchange, nor why the changes were made.
but some other causes for the changes may well be discovered within the firm’s numbers and extra namely the larger aggressive forces which have swirled round it.
Timehop was once first founded in 2011 after Wegener and Wong built the basic coding of the app at a Foursquare hackathon with the original app identify: “4SquareAnd7YearsAgo” to replay past Foursquare check-ins.
the two had been working on some other app collectively at Techstars however made up our minds to change to growing the Foursquare hack into a full-fledged trade after seeing a variety of sure response to the idea that. They prolonged it to facebook posts after which Instagram photos ahead of merging the whole lot into Timehop. in the end, it the app brought extra content sources.
Timehop caught on with millions of customers, for whom it basically served as a kind of counterbalance to the upward thrust of Snapchat and its concept of ever-disappearing, ephemeral content. It was a fun, easy and immediate archive, welcomed and used in a global otherwise full of quick-transferring, always-updating data and a lot of fragmentation, with pieces of our digital selves deposited across a large number of places.
Timehop ultimately raised just over $ 14 million in funding, with investors including Shasta Ventures, Spark Capital and Oreilly AlphaTech Ventures, in addition to a lot of particular person traders, together with Foursquare’s Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai, Alex Rainert and Randi Zuckerberg.
however unfortunately, having a Zuckerberg on the cap desk wasn’t sufficient to keep fb from shifting in.
In March 2015, simply after Timehop hit 12 million downloads and 6 million day-to-day customers, the world’s biggest social network launched its own version of Timehop just for fb posts known as On at the present time.
As you will discover on this table we’ve put along with data from Apptopia, Timehop’s own usage step by step started to decline on each iOS and Android after that time:
additional to this, information supplied to us by Sensortower, showed that downloads in the U.S. between q4 2015 and this autumn 2016 declined via 38 p.c across the two major cellular platforms combined. Sensortower also supplied the merged figures in a table of weekly downloads, which additionally illustrates the drop lovely smartly:
This primarily goes to show that Timehop has been relying more than possibly other apps on having robust loyalty and engagement from current customers, and could explain why having a negative response from those users would have been an particularly bad turn of situations.
Timehop, now beneath the cost of a new executive team, says it’s quietly getting profitable, and i really hope that’s the case. For now, it seems to be doing so on a far smaller scale than its outsized competitor.
A 12 months after facebook launched On these days, it stated 60 million day by day visitors and a hundred and fifty five million subscribers (possibly now not that arduous when your consumer base is coming near 2 billion individuals, and also you’ve speedy turn out to be a default vicinity for where many browse on-line and already share pictures anyway). It’s only anecdotal, but i feel like I’ve been getting pushed many extra of those nostalgic On this present day post tips as of late, and have considered extra of them getting shared — perhaps one of the most ways that facebook is making an attempt to verify extra of us have interaction on its platform.
further reporting Katie Roof
Let’s block commercials! (Why?)
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