Why We Decided To Shut Frankly.me Just A Few Weeks After Raising Pre-Series A Round?

We launched frankly.me a year and a half back with the premise of letting people express themselves through videos or, if put simply, “to be the India’s first video only social network”.

From Arvind Kejriwal to Javed Akhtar a large number of celebrities used frankly.me to express and interact with their fans through video blogs (more popularly known as velfies or vlogs). While we are not large enough yet to be called a social network, we have a loyal community of vloggers with whom we stay in regular touch. As icing on the cake, our user base is growing because of a unique format similar to Dubsmash.

We raised a pre series A round of funding from new as well as existing investors in January 2016, which we haven’t yet disclosed publicly. It is disheartening to see how media / people jumped to conclusions. Hence, I decided to pen down the reality and give a clearer picture to our fellow Entrepreneurs and friends.

Despite these early successes, we haven’t been able to achieve sustainable product market fit. While the market seems keen on adopting video to consume happenings around itself, video creation still remains a challenge and probably a problem a little ahead of its time.

About one-and-a-half years later, we are shutting down the application. Yes, you heard it right.

We have our shares of successes and failures. Nevertheless as a journey frankly.me has further humbled us as human beings. We used to stay in regular touch with our users through phone and person, but believe the channel could have been more efficient. We also realised that startups should avoid premature scaling, even if availability of capital lures you into doing that.

At one point we expanded ourselves thin by trying to solve a lot of use cases at the same time.

Our QnA feature was quite successful with hordes of celebrities approaching us to feature them on the platform. We soon realised that AMA can be a great feature, but not an entire platform. And thus we pivoted to a video expression platform.

Our team of 35 odd people agree with the decision as all of us are taking a break to recharge ourselves and subsequently work on something bigger. If you are interested in hiring any of the Franksters, you can mail me and I will be happy to help you. I must warn you though, most have already been placed in companies of their choice! The only people left unemployed seem to be me and my co-founder, Abhishek Gupta.

Wait, What About The Funding We Raised?

Investors will get a big chunk of their money back, we recognise the need to use money raised only towards something we believe in. To make up for the little they lost in dollars, they get the lifetime privilege of being friends with the notorious Nikunj Jain!

Just kidding – I am extremely lucky and grateful to be funded by the best. They continue to support us in our endeavor to do the unthinkable, through ups and downs. While India is busy building {Uber for X}, our investors trusted us to create a Social Network. Cheers to Matrix Partners for being a friend before an investor.

Bubble Burst? Nah!

Frankly.me shut down had nothing to do with shortage or availability of funds. For our friends who believe that bubble of startups is bursting in India, I think it is not true. We were in Silicon Valley recently for Google Launchpad Accelerator and met a lot of investors and entrepreneurs.

Everybody is excited about Indian market and startups. Some market correction keeps on happening, but that doesn’t imply that there is a bubble. Let’s stop sensationalising the news, and rather constructively contribute to the ecosystem. Long way to go.

Thank you all for using frankly.me and sticking with us till the end. And don’t believe all the negative press.