Poppy: You just emailed a single address, post@posterous.com. And before you even signed up, it built you a whole blog. Just like that. It was proper clever, innit?
Ronan: Oh, yeah? I heard about this. Was it that... that chap, Sachin Agarwal, right? Because he was just fed up with how much hassle blogging was back then. All the logins, the dashboards, the formatting. A right pain, by the sounds of it.
Poppy: Oh, tell me about it. Remember those days? Just trying to get a picture to sit right on a page.
Ronan: Ah, yeah. Tell me about it. So, he builds this prototype then, just takes content by email and publishes it automatically. Simple as that. Shows it to his old college pal, Garry Tan, and Tan just sees it straight away. The elegance of it. Email as the way to post.
Poppy: That's lovely, that. Proper 'build it because you need it' kind of thing.
Ronan: Well, here's the kicker. Two of the biggest things that made it so good were complete accidents. The single email address, post@posterous.com, that was because Agarwal didn't know how to set up a mail server for individual addresses.
Poppy: Wait, so it wasn't a deliberate choice? I always thought that was the genius bit, just one address for everyone.
Ronan: Well, it seemed like genius, didn't it? But no, pure accident. And then, because of that—
Poppy: Wait, so it was an accident and it made it better?
Ronan: Exactly! If someone who wasn't signed up emailed it, the system just went and created a blog for them on the spot. Without them even trying to sign up, can you believe it?
Poppy: No way! Just... poof, a blog?
Ronan: Yeah! So, these two things, right? Born out of technical limitations, they ended up being these massive viral growth mechanics. Proper clever, that.
Poppy: Right. So, you'd email it, expecting, I dunno, an error message or something, yeah? And then suddenly... suddenly you've got a blog. Like, your first post, it's just there. It's almost... what's the word? It makes you feel, like, clever for even finding it. For stumbling onto it, you know? That's actually pretty brilliant, when you think about it.
Ronan: Dead on, that's exactly it. And that was the core of it, wasn't it? You could email anything—text, photos, videos—to post@posterous.com. It'd sort out the formatting, host it, even cross-post it.
Poppy: Cross-post? To everything? Like where?
Ronan: Yeah! Flick, Twitter, Facebook, all of them. It just did it all for you.
Poppy: No faffing then.
Ronan: Not at all. The whole thing took as long as it took to write an email. No faffing, as you say.
Poppy: It sounds almost too easy. Like, where's the catch? I can see why people would've loved it.
Ronan: Simple, wasn't it?
Poppy: Just proper lovely, effortless posting. That's the bit, innit?
Ronan: Yeah, and it worked, too. They were growing, like, thirty percent month-over-month in 2009.
Poppy: That's good going.
Ronan: Mad, yeah. Got up to fifteen million monthly visitors by 2011. But even then, Agarwal was saying their goal was to become 'synonymous with posting just like Google is synonymous with search.' Like, a huge, expansive vision, wasn't it?
Poppy: Hmm. That's a bit of a big jump, innit? From 'email a photo' to 'we're Google'.
Ronan: Exactly. And this is where it starts to go a bit wrong, in my opinion. You know what this reminds me of? All those brilliant, simple apps you use, like a grand to-do list or a note-taking thing, and then suddenly they decide they need to be everything for everyone. They add team collaboration, project management, calendars... and it just becomes this bloated Swiss Army knife that's not good at anything anymore. And you just stop using it.
Poppy: Oh, I know exactly what you mean. That feeling where you open an app you used to love and you're just like, 'What even is this now?' All these buttons and features you don't need.
Ronan: That's it. And that's kind of what happened here. They acquired this social news site tool, Slinkset, which was already a bit of a different direction, I suppose.
Poppy: A social news site? From blogging?
Ronan: I know, right? Then they just started piling on features: group sharing, private spaces, social following. Each one on its own, seemed grand, but all together, it was just—
Poppy: A mess?
Poppy: Too much. Too many buttons. Did the founder actually say that?
Ronan: He did, yeah. Agarwal said new users were confused, didn't understand what the site did. Said there were 'fifty buttons' and no clear call to action. It was losing its clarity, the very thing that made it great.
Poppy: Oh, that's proper sad. Like watching something lovely, just... just get buried under all this stuff, you know? All this noise. So what happened then? Did they just, like, keep adding more to it?
Ronan: No, not quite. In 2011, they tried to fix it, right? Did a full relaunch, pivoted to something called 'Posterous Spaces.' It was all about group sharing and private collaboration, with granular privacy controls and all that.
Poppy: So, a total change then? Like, from the ground up?
Ronan: Yeah, pretty much. They had to rebuild the whole codebase, apparently, because of all the technical debt from adding bits and bobs, you know?
Poppy: A full rebuild? That sounds like a massive undertaking. And expensive, too.
Ronan: Massive. And it took up all the engineering team's time. And get this: at the exact moment Tumblr was really taking off and compounding its lead. It was a big gamble. And it didn't pay off, not one bit. By March 2012, their monthly visitors had fallen from fifteen million down to... are you ready for this? 1.33 million. From fifteen million to just over one million in a year. Just imagine that.
Poppy: Blimey. Fifteen million to just over a million? That's a proper drop, that is. More than ten million lost in a year. A shocker, that.
Ronan: And that was it. Twitter acquired them in an acqui-hire that March, and then the product was shut down completely a year later. Just gone.
Poppy: So, they had this really simple, elegant thing that people loved, and they just... lost it. Tried to be something bigger and ended up being nothing.
Ronan: Yeah, that's... that's the way the article frames it, really. It's like, a massive, a proper strategic blunder. They won the simplicity war, you know? And then just... just abandoned it, didn't they? To fight this social networking battle, a battle they were never, ever built for.
Poppy: But was it really a blunder, though? I mean, was there really a sustainable market for just 'email your blog post' forever? Couldn't they have just been swallowed up anyway by the bigger social media sites, or by things like Tumblr?
Ronan: Well, that's the question, isn't it? The article suggests they could've been a great, sustainable, smaller business if they'd just stuck to their guns. Not every company needs to be a Google-sized unicorn, does it?
Poppy: No, you're right. Not every company. But with mobile apps coming along, and Facebook getting massive, I wonder if their core function was just becoming... a bit, like, obsolete, almost? Maybe the pivot, as desperate as it sounds, was their only real shot, even if it didn't work.
Ronan: But they were making it obsolete themselves by adding all the noise, weren't they? They confused their users, made it harder to use. If they'd stayed simple, maybe they could've found a niche, kept those fifteen million users happy.
Poppy: I just don't know if that niche would've been big enough to sustain a company, though. I mean, how much money can you make from just email-to-post, really? It feels like they were in a really tough spot, whatever they did.
Ronan: And that's where it ended up, isn't it? A cautionary tale about abandoning what made you special to chase after something you're not equipped to win.
Poppy: Yeah, a proper post-mortem. It's almost more painful when you can see where they went wrong, isn't it? I'm Poppy.
Ronan: And I'm Ronan. This has been Startups RIP's Station.