Pownce, a microblogging and file sharing web application, has just failed. Its collapse was wrapped in the comfort of some sort of purchase (with possibly no money on the line) by Six Apart (blogging company), but it was a failure. Once a hot startup, backed by some of the biggest names in the tech world, including even Kevin Rose, it has now crashed among the other failed companies in the deadpool.

What happened? Well, as with any failure, a variety of things. But from the public rumblings we can glean a number of factors that lead to it’s untimely demise.

Firstly, it ran headlong into the industry elephant, Twitter. Attacking the great beast when your product is similar often leads to problems. Increased differentiation would have helped keep it relevant. (I know that it did have quite a varied feature set, but still, its core was microblogging, and there it met its resistance).

Secondly, it was not free. I am a diehard advocate of charging for webapps, but in this case I think it was the right move, but done too early. Pownce never hit the critical mass to make it worthwhile to charge its premium users. So, it crippled itself, limiting the adoption that would have made it viable. They should have waited for a year of two, and then tacked on added features for a fee.

Don’t fight with your cheerleader. Pownce got into a public brawl with Kevin Rose, internet god, and that cost them. When Pownce launched, Kevin pimped the service weekly on his show, Diggnation. By the end he was strictly promoting Twitter. He even went as far as to have contests on the show to attract people to his Twitter account. Burn. That could have culled thousands of users to Pownce.

In the end, it all went to hell. Not that it is all bad, the Pownce team has new jobs at Six Apart, and Kevin got some advisory role. But still, Six Apart acquired the company and all its tech, to promptly shut it down. No questions asked. It’s sad to see something fail, but then again, not too many people are going to mourn this one.

Better luck next time.

My thanks to the 140 people signed up for the midVentures community. Over the past 4 months of existence our fledgling venture development firm went from a concept to a loft with 4 employees, 8+ active projects, potential investment offers, and opportunities in every corner of the midwest.  

Most of that is owing to the friends, clients, advisers, and partners from the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, the Chicago Business Community, our Cleveland friends Goldstein Caldwell, and Justin Savage’s patience in extending the checksense office space for midVentures purposes. And Zac Witte’s interior design skills.

I would like to welcome a few more people to the core midventures team (in that I probably talk to them daily for whatever reason).

Alex Wilhelm: Head of Business Development, Twitter Feed Management, and TechCrunch memorizer; Uchicago Econ Man. 
Kinjal Mehta: Chicago Art Director- recently finishing as a designer on the Obama Campaign; and a SAIC grad.

Mike McNally: Our full-time PHP guy; who refuses to submit unfinished code to his clients.

Cristina Romagnoli: Illustrator and Design Brainstormer; UChicago / Full Sail / SACI Visual Arts Student, gym teacher.

Imran Mohiuddin: UChicago GSB grad and investment banker; working with midVen to build an Incubator fund for midwest startups.

Leon Zhao: L33t H4x0r, CTO of Vibes Media and Lead Developer at Morningstar.

Jeff Osmond, Evan Scott, Jon Soeder, Ian Kinsey, Elbert Clayton, and the Magician are often stopping by.

I would also like to announce that midVentures will begin, starting tonight, development of its own in-house web app. If you want to learn more, ask me for an NDA and I’ll have a courier with a handcuffed briefcase escort our idea. We take our ideas seriously here.