Community focused citizen journalism site Backfence announced June 29 that it is closing. Perhaps demonstrating how dire their situation had become, no one noticed until today.
Backfence had been in trouble for some time; In January CEO and co-founder Susan DeFife resigned and the company reduced staff from 18 to 6.
The company took $3million in venture capital from SAS Investors and The Omidyar Network in October 2005.
BackFence joins the TechCrunch Deadpool.
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Is it really nessicary to announce the start-ups that fail? Surely there must be hundreds of new companies launching that readers would much rather hear about. I know I would.
Dear AdvertiseSpace,
Yes we do want to hear about new stuff, however it’s equally important to learn about what might not be working, at least from my viewpoint it’s very important.
AdvertiseSpace - I think that it is intersting to see these guys fail, especially since they seem to receive so much up-front money to get things going. And plus with the failures publicized, you’ are allowed to see what works and what doesnt….
Asking for VC money is 10x harder to replay back to banks, creditors, investors.
actually, i prefer to read about the downfalls of companies - rather than hearing about startupA and startupB everyday.
it’s relatively easy to startup something - what has more value are the lesssons of why they fail.
I totally agree, in this we can try to understand where the mistakes were and try to avoid them
hey, i LIKE when you profile startups that crash and burn…it’s a solid reminder that ‘many are called, few are chosen’
btw…is mahalo in the deadpool yet?
I think we can learn something from it.
People hate failing… This is something I should learn.
Never take too risky
The reports about failing companies help us know what can go wrong because not everybody is having success despite having a bit of cash poured in. Also if somebody fails, it could be a chance to even revive that same idea but using different techniques that will help you get success. So its not all doom and gloom after all.
Michael Jordan missed more shots than he made. Hats off to those who dare to innovate and take on risk. Good luck to everyone who worked so hard at Backfence.
Unfortunately, BackFence was a good idea that was implemented horribly. Their local sites lacked any kind of interesting , relevant content and frankly were a mess to look at. Not surprising they crashed and burned.
BackFence’s demise and the lack of traction for similar sites like Smalltown.com spells an end to hyper-local sites that try to do one town at a time. That’s just not sustainable or cost-effective. Sites like Topix and a few others that apply their technology on a nationwide basis seem to be doing much better.
Key lesson here is that investor capital is a liability at times. Short term investors like VC’s seek a quick exit, but the business model may not support an exit in a time line that supports short term investors (venture capitalists).
Businesses always have Mr. Long versus Mr. Short as financing options - Mr. Long looks for bootstrapping and other creative financing in contrast to Mr. Short’s venture capital and other short term investors.
Backfence needed financing that makes Mr. Long happy. Too bad, interesting idea, poor financing decisions.
I have heard it many times that people learn more from their mistakes than they often do from their successes. I definitely like learning about what isn’t working (then I try and see if I am replicating any of their behaviors / strategies).
There are a number of sites who are looking to target this space. It will be interesting to see which ones get to scale first.
I’m not that surprised to hear Backfence joining the deadpool. The locations that were chosen were not destination cities. I’m curious as to what other ‘local city’ sites TC readers use for news, information, community, etc. Seems like all the big sites (citysearch, aol guides, digital cities, etc.) also miss the mark because they aren’t ‘local’ enough. Any small local, city sites working well for anyone (besides craigslist)? I own 3 city sites for destination cities in Southern California (http://www.beachlocal.com). The difference is, I’m a one-man show with no investors and yet I have real revenue & profit each month. I can’t believe Backfence had 18 people.
I don’t understand people who take several millions and try to start something. I think it’s more proper to start any project without money, then when you see positive movements you can take some money to make your growing faster.
Any plan is just a words on paper and there is no any guarantee of success.
It’s kind of scary. Most employees and Backfence executives have to stay entry level. They might have hard time finding jobs anywhere.
For example, founders or executives can’t no longer get second chance or ask for VC money.
Banks, government, and IRS have their records.
Best way to sell their million dollar homes and start living apartment.
Backfence essentially spent 3 million dollars to scale 13 less-than-desirable cities.
@TJ - You’re totally right. The sight was really hard on the eyes and confusing to understand. If you’re playing to smaller cities, the best advice is always easiest: (KISS) Keep it Simple Stupid.
We’ve made a lot of mistakes in our efforts, but our initial plan has gotten us to where we are today. We’ve scaled by listing every business in the U.S. and making them searchable within all the major search engines. A business can easily ‘claim’ their listing and customize it. 150K signed-on in cities big and small with NO SALESFORCE. We hope it’ll be enough.
As for Backfence employees, I think they’ll be okay finding a job. Just like many of us who learn from our mistakes, they saw what worked and what didn’t - first hand.
Sincerely,
Kevin Leu
http://www.merchantcircle.com
Backfence was a courageous effort that was followed closely by many in the local news business.
Hyper-local is the future/present of news and information distribution. If we’ve learned anything from Web 1.0 and 2.0, it’s that a great idea doesn’t always equal a profitable business - especially when you are one of the first guys in the game.
Savvy news managers will integrate Backfence’s best ideas into their evolving news content delivery models.
Best of luck to visionaries like Susan - and her believers - that get “IT.”
“Hyper-local is the future/present of news and information distribution.”
In theory. To some extent, you have to wonder just how interested people are in reading about the town’s little league championship, what happened at the church BBQ on Saturday went and what was decided at the last City Hall meeting. I would argue that the future of news and information distribution is more likely to be hyper-targeted than hyper-local. That is, most people, faced with increasingly little free time, have very specific interests and would probably be most receptive to services that enable them to efficiently and accurately aggregate news and information about those interests. Obviously, there are services like this out there and I think they’re more likely to have long-term success than services which are focused on very narrow local topics.
Perhaps Backfence executed poorly or was ahead of its time, but one thing is clear: it’s going to be a lot more difficult for user-generated content and citizen media efforts to become a real force. Even if you believe that the mainstream media isn’t serving consumer needs well, Backfence shows that simply being non-mainstream won’t guarantee success either.
In thinking through a hyperlocal strategy for a startup, I’ve decided that it’s not enough to serve a local population, because many Internet users think of themselves in more global terms. For the interests that are local, there are already sites that list events, businesses and news. Common wisdom says that city newspapers can no longer afford to cover the local beat, and that citizen journalism will fill that gap, but there’s a big dropoff in quality of reporting and few citizens are willing to put journalistic labor into their reporting. Local citizen journalism can work, I believe, but it needs to choose a large enough target audience and speak its language.
Which makes more sense for local: get deep and uniquely useful content in a small geography, then replicate that process for hundreds of towns, or launch the whole US with shallow content all at once? (Choose one, because you can’t launch with deep local content everywhere at the same time.) InsiderPages went wide and shallow and it didn’t work out. Backfence tried to go deep in several towns at the same time and it, too, couldn’t get enough traction. Smalltown is going very deep in a very small geography, with plans to replicate that success quickly when we have all the technology and marketing knobs dialed in.
Smalltown is doing very well. Our informal blog documents our progress ( http://blog.smalltown.com ). In the area we serve, we get tens of thousands of monthly visitors, almost 3 percent of the population are registered users, and our sales numbers are accelerating.
It’s certainly too early to say Smalltown has “cracked the code” on local advertising, but here is one way to judge our progress:
1. Go to http://www.smalltown.com/sanmateo and do a search for “hot dogs”. You get lots of great results that include a local pizza place that has hot dogs on its menu. There are videos, coupons and reviews. This is deep local content and we launched less than a year ago.
2. Now go to http://www.yellowpages.com and do a search for “hot dogs” in San Mateo, CA. After navigating to the category “hamburgers and hot dogs” you get 3 results. Two of them are sandwich shops outside San Mateo. One of them is a hamburger diner with one badly written review. This is an example of broad but shallow content.
3. Now go to http://www.citysearch.com and do the same search. Under the sponsored link for Pizza Hut, the top result is for a bakery outside of San Mateo. Under that is a listing for a golf course outside San Mateo. The third result is for a sushi restaurant, but at least it is in San Mateo. This is another example of broad but shallow.
4. Finally, go to http://www.yelp.com. I think Yelp is great and I don’t really consider them a Smalltown competitor, but I was surprised by the results. Their search results for “hot dogs” in San Mateo are: (1) a sponsored link for dog daycare (2) a link to a dog park (3) a link to an event called the Maker Faire that I assume had hot dogs and (4) a listing for Ben Franks, which is a hot dog restaurant, but it’s not in San Mateo.
IMHO: The best place for hot dogs in San Mateo is Jack’s Grill next to the movie theater across the street from the Smalltown office. Try the apple chicken sausage. But you wouldn’t know that from any of the “broad and shallow” sites.
AdvertiseSpace
yep, want to hear about all of them, not just the winners… keeps it real
PS: wonder if you are a TC employee, maybe in marketing division, haha
This is a great way to get feed back for article content
James,
These people are smart… one loss isn’t the end of the world. When you are bankrupt you still have many opportunities. Many billionaires go bankrupt one or more times in their lives.
cheers.
#20 (Drama20) says something smaht - i want tailored information - that’s what i thought feed readers were for. Topix seems to want to go this route, and it helps - i subscribe to my town’s Topix feed.
what are these ‘other sites’ that already do this ‘interest aggregation’? do any of them work?
as for all the ‘not choosing the right towns’ comments - bizarre. and that’s all i have to say about that.
i agree on Backfence’s implementation - not good. i remember hearing that it was some guy’s customization of something or other. brilliant.
and the ‘heavy hitter’ management - they had pedigrees in absolutely nothing, yet were hailed as saviours for hyperlocal. nothing against them - i just remember thinking how absurd all the ‘management’ hype was.
as for ‘the formula’ that sites should use to provide local news, learn from the people who are doing it right - google, topix, craigslist, and indymedia.org. this doesn’t have to be rocket science.
oh, and don’t choose a horrible name for your website. chance of failure for any local news venture is directly related to the corniness and predictability of the URL for said venture - as demonstrated.
– paid for by PayPerComment
I recall a couple of years ago contacting BackFence about adding my city. Their response was something to the effect of, “We’ll be rolling out new cities in the near future.” Of course, since I lived in a small town, the chance of them ever getting to it was slim to nil.
The fact there was this “top-down-command-and-control” mentality to me spelled its demise. Why was it only within their purview to add new locations? Why was the user allowed to add his own, similar to the way NeighborhoodCrossing.com does it? In this era of UGC, sites like BackFence were a step back to the past, and no one I know looks forward to the past.
I also agree with the conjecture that their choice of cities were not the most advantageous either. Add to that the snail’s pace at which they added new ones…it was bound to end in disaster.
Oops…in my previous comment I meant to say “why was the user NOT allowed to add his own?”
I may be (okay I am) biased but especially a year later when you look at how “successful” these targeted higher dollar sites have worked out I maintain that our model is not only more practical as a search tool - let’s not use hot dogs as an example try a more practical application like beauty salons not just in the San Mateo area but say specifically near the 94062 zip code like our page at
http://www.mustardpages.com/Di.....ons/Page_1 and not only do you get localized results but if businesses choose to advertise for more exposure, the costs are minimal. I think the model has to be much closer to the craigslist model than the yellowpages model.