We talked about more than Pownce and Twitter in this interview. Leah Culver is a developer who launched many projects. Pownce was just the highest profile of them. I asked her about it because I’m insanely curious about why it didn’t crush Twitter.
Here’s what I saw from the outside. In March 2007, when Pownce launched, Twitter didn’t have much of a head start. It only had about 250,000 members, and Twitter’s site was still unstable and often inaccessible. So Pownce launched at a good time. Plus it offered more features. Plus it had a real revenue plan with its premium accounts. Plus it was backed by Kevin Rose a Web celebrity with geek cred. Why didn’t it win?
I excerpted one of Leahs answers to that question below. Listen to the full interview for more.
Pre-interview ad for Haystack.com:
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Text excerpts
Excerpt 1
Andrew: OK. All right. We talked about what you did well, what do you wish you did differently?
Leah: That’s a really good question. I really hated that the comparison to Twitter. I think, if I were to do a new start up or a different company, I would pick it in an area where there wasn’t such good competition, determined competition. I think there is definitely different levels of start ups and Twitter was definitely (laughs) a good start up, and it’s really hard to compete or be compared to.
Andrew: Why were they such good competitors? It seemed like they were down most of the time that you, guys, were up. It seemed like they weren’t doing that much on their site, it was just text. You, guys, did so much more, you are more alive. What made them such good competitors?
Leah: I think because the team is very focused, they have an excellent team.
Excerpt 2
Leah: You know, I feel like it’s really unfortunate that people saw it as that kind of rivalry because we never, that was never the intent. When we launched the site and we first got like they compare us to Twitter, it was like shocking because Pownce is definitely a very different type of a site, a different type of feel, a different type of community. I think that, you know, maybe the press jumped on it as an opportunity to write about something that just, you know, that rivalry was just never there.