All things come to an end. At least this is what people think and this is exactly what happened with Social Whale. We are very sad to make this announcement but as it looks there is no alternative option at the moment.

How our little story started

We’ve started back in 2008 with the vision of creating a complete social media client. In fact we were just creating a product for ourselves but as it seemed many people liked it. This way we became a team very fast and Social Whale transformed from a pet project to a full time business for everyone involved.

The experience was fantastic. We were one of the first tools that added so many networks, we were picked up by geek VIPs, we won a few contests and in general our little team from Greece was ready to reach the skies. But…

We’ve failed. Many many times

And failure was fantastic too. We’ve learned so many things, and as people were still loving us after each and every of those failures we were happy. And we were keep going, and we were keep on failing.

But finally we understood that we had to stop chasing this vision. At least for the time being. After all it’s all about the team, not the product. And some times you need to let go.

Below are the main reasons we finally shut down the service:

1. Startups need a lot of money

Keeping a team of great talented people requires money. Of course we had no problem sacrificing anything in order to keep our vision alive, but after a point it was obvious that Social Whale would never had the chance to bootstrap and take care of our financial issues. On the other hand raising funds for a crazy idea like this is very hard, especially in a place like Greece.

2. The “open web” is old news

Since the last years an observer of the big social media players can see that all the openness that created monsters like Twitter and Facebook is fading away.

Suits now need money so everyone is closing their platform in order to make some. We really hope that this trend will stop when social networks find a way to monetize their growth, or maybe when other networks emerge that deal with the problem. But until then we can’t risk our efforts.

We are really sad that Twitter actually banned clients, social backup services and in general they are restricting access to their API. This is a reality that should keep every cool team out of their ecosystem.

3. Startups are about the people who create them

The ultimate lesson we got from this experience was the importance of our team. We really like working on cool things that can help people, and in order to do that we need to… well exist. So we decided to start another product that can actually have some impact, and in the same time help us have our costs covered.

It was a fantastic journey. We really feel grateful to all those people who have supported us, and we hope we can do something with our beloved whale later.

Kind of a sad story, but we should keep in mind that the end of something is usually the beginning of something else 🙂