Farewell to Circa News (opens in new tab)

I think Circa was a pretty innovative app, so I'm trying to pull some lessons from their failure.

They raised nearly $6m and never made any money. The product was pretty good, but the question is what was the business staff being paid to do?

According to their website they had 8 editorial staff and 10 product staff members. This seems like too large of a team for not having product-market fit. Would they have had trouble securing more funding if their burn-rate was half of what it was?

It sounds like they are still in the middle of possible negotiations... Maybe things might change.

Are there any details on their metrics?

I've seen a few of these posts in recent times where the app/company decided not to compromise (for a subpar? experience) on their product and went out of business.

I guess it comes down to principle, but I'd be curious to hear about ones that have faced this dilemma and compromised and maybe made it through the crunch to continue building the product.

Is a great product that can no longer be used better than a good product that might be able to evolve in the future?

As my primary news app, this was a great product. Figuring out how to turn it into a business sounds like it was simply too challenging with the runway they had.

Sad to see Circa go... for now.