PALO ALTO, CA—FrendTrend, a new social media startup that branded itself as “a fun, intuitive way to connect and share with friends online,” celebrated its long-awaited launch at 9 a.m. this morning, shuttering its doors later this morning at 9:45 a.m.
As the brainchild of tech developer Greg Nesheim, 36, FrendTrend was designed to be a virtual community for friends and acquaintances to interact using live chat and photo-sharing features, a service the site provided for exactly 45 minutes before the company liquidated all of its assets.
“The site just didn’t catch on, what can I say?” Nesheim told reporters of the website that, less than an hour earlier, he launched excitedly with the tagline “Get ready for the next wave in social media.” “I posted some videos and messages on my little FrendTrend ‘pod,’ as we called them, but there were only like five or six other users and they all worked for the company, so it was like, ‘This sucks.’”
“It’s just too bad we have to pack up all this office furniture after unloading it only a couple of hours ago,” Nesheim continued.
During a candid postmortem 10 minutes after the site had been removed and an hour after it had launched, Nesheim cited myriad difficulties in the site’s first 15 or 20 minutes, including logistical hurdles, a stubborn market share, and administrative hassles.
“Within 52 seconds of the site’s launch, you could tell things weren’t looking good, and after 30 minutes I figured, ‘All right, let’s just give it 15 more minutes and if it hasn’t taken off by then, fuck it,’” said Nesheim, who frantically and unsuccessfully attempted to sell the company to an outside investor within minutes of FrendTrend going live. “It had so much promise when I walked into our office for the first time this morning. People just didn’t give it a chance.”
“Although I guess the writing had been on the wall for minutes and minutes,” Nesheim added.
Though disappointed by this latest setback, Nesheim told reporters he is excited to pitch investors on his next tech venture, a consumer-to-consumer online auction and shopping website called iBuy.