Yawn. TechCrunch reports that MyHeritage and Geni are really duking it out. MyHeritage has raised $9 MM over three rounds. Geni has raised $11.5 MM at stupid valuations if TechCrunch is to be believed. It’s also interesting that the investors aren’t particularly known for foolishness either - Accel, The Founder’s Fund, and CRV. Then again, big firms make some of the stupidest move. My money is on both of these companies generating negative return for Accel and CRV.
In the case that our friendly fools in Silicon Valley forgot that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (a.k.a. Mormons) dominate this business, I thought I’d refer them to FamilySearch.org which provides an incredible library of resources on ancestors. Now I know that Geni and MyHeritage are focused more on living relatives as opposed to FamilySearch which focuses on deceased relatives, but the point is that researching and cataloguing living relatives is boring and is not compelling. Why will Geni and MyHeritage fail?
1. These sites are not viral. There is little reason for them to grow. Let’s take a look at their traffic. Geni isn’t even as popular as the overhyped failure known as Justin.tv. Sure, Alexa isn’t perfect but given that these are major social networking sites, you’d think they have a bit more momentum. Clearly, they don’t.
2. If your family members are into social networking, they are already on Myspace, Facebook, Orkut, Hi5, Tagged, etc. and don’t care about Geni and MyHeritage. Yes, I know there is always room for niche social networks and in 20 years, Myspace and Facebook will be just a pleasant memory in our past - kind of like LA Lights. Older family members are unlikely to join and if they are, they are probably the kind of person who already has an account and will use another social network.
3. Current social networks already allow you to be “friends” with your family. This sounds silly, but you can tag people as relatives on Facebook. Why on earth would I want to join a social network just to “network” with my family. Unless I’m organizing the Smith Family Reunion, I think I can manage my family contacts fairly well with the pre-existing resources. If I was to be organizing the Smith Family Reunion, I’d just create a group on Google, Facebook, or elsewhere.
4. Being featured on TechCrunch is a proxy for being a dumb start-up. No further comment is required.
Bye bye Geni and MyHeritage.
sorry, but you’re wrong.
Geni is PURELY viral. Geni smartly adds a field for each family member’s email address. this is huge for those interested in geneology, since (a) everyone works on a collaborative tree, so there doesn’t have to be a “manager” doing all the work and (b) this makes it easy to get that odd second-cousin who is also working on your tree to share their info.
i’d also say it’s novel and addresses a distinct audience from other social networks, and one that is more profitable. my 60-yo mother is a genophile and has struggled with the familysearch software for years. Geni is the first website i’ve ever shown her that she said “wow! this is easy!”
she’s a great example of a desirable persona, that unsophisticated user that every start-up leaves behind because they’re just too difficult. but they are not the long tail, they’re the short one.
Geni et all are not sticky. Once you’re done with this tree, what then?!
Jay, you’re delusional.
mikeb already made my point for me. Once you’ve made it, you’re done. Na - na - na - na say goodbye.
na na na na, na na na na, hey hey hey, Gooodbyyyyye
You guys are so wrong! My senile aunt just loves these sites and she checks everyday to see who has updated. She is just too paranoid to click ads or buy anything online. But, it is a really great branding opportunity!!! Too bad she will be dead in ten years or less and already realized clothes (or any other items) don’t make the person. What else could geni et al. sell but adverts? Please let me know. Thnx.
it’s clear that the negative posts here don’t understand the audience. personally, i think that you guys are right when you criticize hype, but wrong to criticize ingenuity/innovation/opportunity.
nobody can say if geni will succeed, but they are doing three things i’ll applaud: (1) targeting a definable audience with demonstrated market power; (2) using new technologies to improve on an existing model and challenge a dominant competitor; and (3) embracing user experience and design (what consumers want) over engineering hype/dogma (what the valley wants).
i’ll stand behind you when you criticize facebook because it doesn’t do #1 at all, #3 poorly, and it remains to be seen if it does #2 nearly as well as the hype suggests. but when you dismiss other ventures as “lame”, you risk being just as inarticulate and easy to write off as your friend Duncan Riley.
imho, geni is doing a lot right, and certainly nothing wrong. pick on something work picking on.