Updated
An online site for small communities, BackFence, appears to have shut its doors.
The company, which offered news, blogs, photos, and forums for a handful of medium-sized towns, had been struggling. In early Janaury, BackFence laid off many of its employees and replaced its co-founder and chief executive, Susan DeFife. We wrote about it back then and speculation grew that its days were numbered.
When reached for comment, co-founder and chief executive Mark Potts said the shutdown of the community sites was the just end of the long slide that began back then and that the site has been “pretty much running on autopilot for the last few months.”
This is an intensely competitive industry, and we’ll be writing about it more shortly.
BackFence’s site is still live, but when you visit one of the community pages, like Bethesda for example, there is a note saying that “BackFence Says Goodbye.” This is true on all the community pages.
It had raised at least $3 million from SAS Investors and Omidyar Network. Mark Potts says that the investors are considering a sale or maybe even a new infusion of cash. Josh Grotstein, of SAS, is leading the effort.
Update: Co-founder Mark Potts has responded, changes above.
2 Comments
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KevinL. said:
Backfence’s intentions were good trying to stay local and get people talking locally, but burning through 3 million dollars to scale 13 smaller cities in the U.S. doesn’t normally translate well for success. It’s a difficult proposition to play while hoping to hit that tipping point, where growth becomes self-sustaining. In fact, I think you will find that Topix.com has accomplished some of Backfence’s local conversation goals with a more scaleable approach.
At MerchantCircle, we started with the idea that we had to grow, not only in big cities, but small as well. There’s a lot of ‘local’ companies who are playing one side or the other right now - either starting in big cities and trying to work their way down, or smaller and work their way up.
We’ve been fortunate in the fact that we just hit 150,000 merchants signed on this week after over a year of having launched. Those 150k are coming from big cities (Phoenix, Denver) and small (Tucson, Colorado Springs). We have penetrated every state and every region and type of business. We figured, if we built every business a customizable page that could be found in the search engines - they would come. They understand and are engaging in creating content, including building coupons and blogging.
So far, no slowdown in sight. It’s sad to see Backfence go, but good people will land on their feet. These guys clearly know the local media space and had incredible passion along side of that knowledge.
Sincerely,
Kevin Leu
http://www.merchantcircle.com -
Kevin McDoodoohead said:
The guys at MerchantCircle take every opportunity to use comment boards on tech blogs to talk up their company. It annoys me, and I wish they’d stop.
4 Trackbacks
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