Yusuf: Gustaf Alstromer, in his Y Combinator interview back in 2007... he was there to talk about his app, Heysan. Not just any app, mind you, it's a mobile messaging aggregator, you see.
Fatima: Okay, like, before WhatsApp and all that, yeah?
Yusuf: Exactly. He's demonstrating a feature—you could take a picture on your phone, then send it straight to your social media profile. Paul Graham, he just... stops him mid-pitch.
Fatima: Seriously?
Yusuf: He says, 'That feature right there? That could be a whole company on its own.'
Fatima: Oh, no. That's... they didn't pursue it, did they?
Yusuf: No. They didn't. Three years later, Instagram. Just... poof.
Fatima: Oh, my word. The near miss of that, eish. So, Heysan was basically trying to be like, a super-app for all these different messaging services, yeah?
Yusuf: That's it. Back in 2007, mobile messaging was... a mess. Honestly.
Fatima: A mess how?
Yusuf: SMS was expensive. And all those big desktop IM networks—MSN, Yahoo, AIM, ICQ, Google Talk—their mobile versions? Not good.
Fatima: Right.
Yusuf: Heysan wanted to be the one place you could get everything.
Fatima: For free, right?
Yusuf: For free. All of it.
Fatima: For free? That sounds... that sounds like a good idea, actually. Super-ambitious for that time, even.
Yusuf: Incredibly ambitious, yeah. The article... it points out, each network had a different protocol.
Fatima: Oh, wow.
Yusuf: So building one client, logging into all of them, relaying messages, on those super limited phones of the era? That was... that was a massive engineering feat.
Fatima: I suppose... I always forget how basic phones were then. We just take it for granted now, don't we? Just message anyone, anywhere.
Yusuf: Unbelievable.
Fatima: So they had this incredible technical achievement, and then this Instagram moment they missed... so what did happen, exactly?
Yusuf: Well, they actually... they got up to over a million users, even a hundred million monthly pageviews. Which, for the time, it's pretty big, you know?
Fatima: That's huge.
Yusuf: Right? But the growth problem... that's where it hit them. They couldn't make their ad-supported model work, not really. And the main issue, I think, was that their whole thing was built on all these other IM networks.
Fatima: On borrowed land, almost.
Yusuf: Exactly. And those networks, they eventually started building their own mobile clients. So Heysan just became... less special. Less needed.
Fatima: Ah, like a feature, not a product. That's always the risk when you're building on someone else's platform, isn't it? They can just... pull the rug out from under you, like that.
Yusuf: Exactly. The article, it really drives that home. But the interesting part for me, really, is what came out of it. You know? This whole experience, Heysan failing to grow... it actually, it kind of turned Gustaf Alstromer into— how do I say this— a world-class expert on growth.
Fatima: So, a pivot?
Yusuf: More like... a transformation for him. He goes to Spotify, then he's VP of Growth at Uber for years. Like, years.
Fatima: So the failure became... his education, then?
Yusuf: Precisely. The article, it puts it so well: the most valuable outcome isn't always an acqui-hire, or even the market lessons. It's... it's how the failure transforms the founder. Like, this inability to grow Heysan? That's what made him dedicate his whole career to mastering growth.
Fatima: That's a good point, actually.
Yusuf: Yeah. You know, it reminds me of... like Slack, right? That was an internal tool for a gaming company that completely failed. Or Flickr, that started as part of an online game, too. It feels like so many great ideas, they're just... they're waiting. In the wings of other, well, less-great ideas.
Fatima: It's true, you see that often. But for Heysan... I keep thinking about that photo feature, you know? It was such a perfect, self-contained thing. Was it really just bad timing that they didn't pursue it, or was the whole Heysan idea just... fundamentally flawed because they were relying on other people's platforms? I mean, if you're always subject to— well, never mind.
Yusuf: I lean towards bad timing, to be honest. If they'd had access to the smartphone ecosystem a few years later, maybe that photo-sharing feature, or even the messaging aggregation, it could have taken off. They were... a hair's breadth from being WhatsApp or Instagram, just a little too early, I think.
Fatima: But even if they were earlier, the core problem of being dependent on those big IM networks, Yusuf... that doesn't go away, does it? They could still just decide to close off their APIs. You're building a house on rented land, really, aren't you? I mean, who knows when they'll—
Yusuf: But if you grow fast enough... you become indispensable, don't you? Maybe they could have become the de facto standard that the big players couldn't ignore. Or even been bought out! Sometimes critical mass, it changes everything.
Fatima: Perhaps. But for every one that manages that, I wonder... how many just get crushed when the platform changes its mind, eh? It feels like an inherent weakness. Still, I admire that Alstromer managed to turn that 'not quite there' into his superpower.
Yusuf: Absolutely. It's a testament to seeing failure not as an end, but as a very expensive, very effective school, you know? And that's something. Something real.
Yusuf: I'm Yusuf.
Fatima: And I'm Fatima. This has been Startups RIP's Station.