Ask HN: What Happened to LikeALittle (lal.com)?

13 points by rogercosseboom 13 years ago | 5 comments

Publicly known: The founders created LikeALittle, completed YC, and then a little while later launched another product, Circle. At some point they seem to have launched one or more new products at hawthornelabs.com.

Though lal.com has dropped in traffic recently, one would expect this as normal behavior during summer months.

LaL was abruptly shut down about 3 weeks ago.

Personally I was very enamored with LaL, and would dream of coming up with something that was that popular. I'm curious to hear more about how they decided to pivot away from a successful, funded project to focus on one (or more) other ideas.

emreas 13 years ago |

Thanks for the question. We stopped focusing resources on Likealittle about 6 months ago to focus on our mobile app (what is now Circle www.discoverCircle.com). We believe that in order to give ourselves the greatest chance of being successful, we need to fully focus on one product so that we are thinking about it day and night and not diluting our resources. We think of Circle as a product in the same general space as Likealittle was (location based interaction), but with a much broader appeal and larger possible end game. I knew I was going to spend the same amount of time stressing, worrying and working hard no matter what startup I had so I want to do the idea that I am most passionate about and think has the biggest chance of changing the way the world works. Likealittle felt like sugar water to me... We learned an incredible amount about community management, viral marketing, and communication with our users through Likealittle and use those learnings on a daily basis as we develop Circle further. Btw, on a side note, I do think there is a market for anonymous location based chatting & flirting and if the community is well managed, somebody could run a successful site doing that. If somebody is extraordinarily interested in it, I'd be happy to let them know the "recipe" to get the initial takeoff on a college campus and may be willing to hand over our code if of interest.

ashraful 13 years ago | |

I would love to chat with you about LikeALittle. Your email isn't in your profile so can you please email me at inlith@gmail.com if you have the time.

unohoo 13 years ago |

Actually, I was wondering the same thing last week. I happened to accidentally land on their site while searching for something and was greeted with the nginx msg. As per their Wikipedia article, they sent an email sometime last month notifying about the shut down.

keiferski 13 years ago |

I assume that it got shut down due to inactivity. The few times I checked it, there were only a handful of posts from months ago.

bazookaBen 13 years ago |

what happened to the community then? did you redirect them to a different service?