The sad case study of Hi5 – From First Mover to Porn Shower?

Shucks.

What a tragedy.

In 2001, hi5.com began to show up in e-mails from friends.

I checked out the site but could not understand the context of what the site offered. It looked sleazy even back then.

hi5.com just came and died out.

By 2008 – 2009, facebook had begun rocking the world. Zynga became Napoleon of Social Games, riding the stallion called facebook.

Interestingly, in 2010, the famous ‘Alex St. John’ took over hi5 and positioned it as the ‘new social network for games’!

He bashed up Zynga as often as he could in conferences & forums and called them a “Clickfest business that just rolled our spamville” (my quote maybe off, but you get the point, right?).

Now, Alex St. John really knows how to get your attention!

At least his troupe of ‘corridor walkers’ got my attention in the Austin GDC online convention in October 2010:

Impressed by his vision of creating a new arena for social games that could take on the mighty Zynga, my partner Mahesh and I met several hi5 executives in San Francisco and discussed how we could migrate our games to their platform.

We tried to so something but nothing moved.

hi5’s major traffic was from Portugal, Spain and India; and these countries did not monetize well.

We lost interest. They never followed up.

In January of this year (2012), an ex co-founder of hi5 came to India as part of the ‘Geeks on a Plane’ crew. He told me that all the original founders (hi5 was set up by a group of Indians in the Valley) had been diluted beyond recognition by the new VCs that had led future financing rounds; I assume under the stewardship of Alex St. John.

That was it.

Today, I was shocked out of my wits when I received this e-mail!!

WHOA!!

This is the new hi5????

This is PORNO SHIT! And these look like Indian women! 

Where did they all come from???

Check the image of the woman on the top right corner – this DOES NOT look decent at all!!

I panicked and went up to hi5 to check what content of games2win features there.

I got hit by this entrance screen 🙁

I have to tell hi5 my Sexual Orientation to enter the site?????

Man…

This is a classic case study of how a StartUp that scaled well, eventually got ruined.

Lessons that I learn from this:

– Even if you are selling your Business under acute distress, make sure that you do some diligence on the buyers!

I know it’s difficult, but in a case like this in which hi5 looks like it’s fast becoming a porno network, its founders and even Alex St. John will surely have some negative ruboff.

People remember you for the firms you’ve founded. That memory lasts long…

– If the site is becoming *** {whatever it’s becoming}, the new owners should respect the earlier users of the site and start from scratch – rather than sending them mails like this.

– The VCs who have eventually handed over the site to the new owners should insist that at least the content and database of the previous business be ‘sanitized’ in some way so that there is minimum backlash.

Tomorrow, I could even sue hi5 for featuring my content in a porno environment!

– Anything can happen! You may start something and get funded for building it in a certain way, but it can land up like this…That’s the curse of being an entrepreneur…

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