{ height: 1%; } - Ruby on Rails and User Interface Design

Kiko in the deadpool

Posted by Richard White Thu, 17 Aug 2006 05:57:00 GMT

It was both a sad and liberating day for me as Kiko dived into the deadpool. I won't get into all of the dynamics of the situation, but, in a nutshell, we had lost our spark and were letting our users down by not improving the product the way we should have. We felt it best to move on to other ventures rather than try and drag this one along even further.

I am actually proud of this exit strategy in a way. While it's not the one we envisioned going into things, I still think we are doing our best to satisfy the two most important stakeholders in Kiko: our investors and our users. We do care about our investors' money and instead of just burning through the rest of the piggy bank trying to get our groove back we are trying to recoup their investment (we stand to gain little from the auction). We have also put in place both iCal export and account deletion so our users can take their data with them over to another calendar service if they so choose (or stick with Kiko while we find an acquirer).

While Kiko may be seen by some as a another web 2.0 failure, for me personally it's been the catalyst for the greatest period of self development in my career. Without Kiko there is no AjaxScaffold, SlimTimer or Brighthouse. Without Kiko I have a lot less really smart friends and cool "I met _____!" stories.

So thank you to Justin and Emmett, Kiko's founders, for rolling the dice on a guy you'd never met in person and thank you to our users for all your kind words and tolerance of our mistakes.

Update: I've also posted a take on what we learned and what we screwed up.