Imzy, the kinder, gentler online community platform, will be shutting down on June 23rd.
Company co-founder Dan McComas made the announcement in a blog post today, stating his apologies and explaining to the community Imzy just couldn’t find its place in the market:
Some of you have been here since our launch into beta and some are brand new. We’ve loved getting to know all of you and seeing you build communities and make new friends. Unfortunately, we were not able to find our place in the market. We still feel that the internet deserves better and hope that we see more teams take on this challenge in the future.
McComas and his partner Jessica Moreno left their jobs at Reddit and headed to Salt Lake City, Utah in the summer of 2015 to launch their idea for a more inclusive social board.
Imzy opened the platform to the public last fall and has since grown to tens of thousands of users with more than 6,000 Imzy communities. It was using the same kinds of threaded comments as found on a site like Reddit, but started out with basic rules on how people should treat each other instead of the haphazard way Reddit allowed certain more unsavory trolls to run rampant on its site at the time.
But it turns out that wasn’t something a lot of people were into, and now Imzy has to close up shop on its idealistic experiment in being nice on the internet.
On the bright side, McComas said users’ data would be protected and gave them a link to where they could request their data. He also mentioned the /Imzy community board would be open to allow everyone to post. “This seems like a good place for us to gather, share memories, and say our goodbyes,” he said.
Imzy had raised a total of $11 million, $8 million of which came in the fall of 2016. According to a source, the co-founders only recently came to the decision to shut down and wanted to do so with plenty of cash still in the bank — so they may have something else in the works. We’ve reached out to ask and will let you know if and when we hear back about that.
This is shocking news to us here at TechCrunch as we just visited the Imzy team a few months ago as part of our foray into Utah’s startup scene. You can see that interview with Moreno below:
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