Mobile Video Sharing App Socialcam (YC W12) Acquired By Autodesk For $60 Million (opens in new tab)

We care more about founders than ideas, and the founders of SocialCam are great in every respect: nice, effective, and good technically. And SocialCam itself is necessarily innovative because video sharing is being invented right now. The app looks simple because they worked hard to make it so.

So the lesson here is actually one that we learned long ago. Great founders succeed.

I find it very unlikely that you had "at least" 3 friends quit Facebook because of SocialCam but whatever you say. I personally think this is exactly the kind of startup PG should invest in anyway. It fits the YC model perfectly.

Upvoted because this made me laugh.

They couldn't become an Instagram because they knew their growth wasn't sustainable or real in any way. They had to sell or they'd fade into obscurity.

Yes. The point is that you really need to push the envelope if you want to succeed.

I was burned by one of my "advisor" and scaled down Facebook feed posting because he said it was "spam". WRONG ADVICE: competition ran over me.

In part, yes.

New distribution channels don't appear that often and when they appear you should rush to be early and aggressive, as they decline in effectiveness over time, which limits competitors' ability to match you.

Of course a strong product and good retention are essential to keeping those users, but you are a video app and this opportunity were to present itself you would be crazy (stupid) not to jump on as quickly as humanly possible.

Traffic inflation via user manipulation => Lots of spam traffic => People hate it but because it's spammy it still gets traffic => Socialcam guys realizes nothing good will come out of the situation => A fool approaches => Sell.

No one's hurt--the founder's made money, the investors made money--except for the users who found out more than they needed to (and wanted to) know about their friends and family, such as a daughter finding out their dad watched bunch of bikini videos and wet tshirt contest videos, etc.

I would imagine it is a talent acquisition. Autodesk has been trying to hire for a new cloud team in Detroit and San Francisco for a while...without luck, I think. (I was a reject)

Nearly all of social cam's traffic came from the timeline. Viddy is just content uploaded by me or you, so I'd venture to say most of their traffic is real but SocialCam was embedding YouTube videos of women in bikini's, funny clips, etc and whenever you watched one of them it would post on your Facebook timeline, just watching a video made you a user. This is why half of my Facebook friends seemed to have SocialCam accounts but not one of them had actually posted a video.

It's not sustainable and they knew it, Facebook will eventually kill off this kind of traffic so they sold out before the wave completely fizzles out.

Great job to them, was the right decision.

Well, isn't the image you provided [1] answering your question already? It has been a trend for a while (hard to determine how organic since both companies spammed the heck out of Facebook wall) and now when the dust settled, there is nothing left behind.

In this example a large corporation agreed to be the one to turn the lights off (vide Zynga purchase of DrawSomething -- nothing can save the dropping audience #s) and so congratulation to PG and SocialCam team: selling rotten eggs is becoming hard to do.

I'm totally in shock right now! SO FREAKING PROUD! Do they mark the start of the JTV mafia officially?

Because their numbers were boosted using shady tactics that Facebook are starting to stop, when Facebook completely kills these apps their real traffic (videos people are actually uploading) will become non existent.