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Moped

Free messaging application

General Information

Category

Social Media

Country

Germany

Started

In 1998

Business Failure

Business Outcome

Acquired

Closed

By 2014

Cause of Failure

No Market Need

Founders & Employees

Number of Founders

One

Name of Founders

Schuyler Deerman

Number of Employees

Between 11 And 50

Funding

Number of Funding Rounds

Total Funding Amount

$1M

Number of Investors

Description

Moped was a social app available for every device. Registered users could send and receive messages from their network connections. Beside the messaging service for both private and business purposes, Moped also offered a variety of other services to its users online. Some of its features included the possibility to upload the content and share it online with other users through Dropbox, or even to explore what nearby places offer good services, food, party, etc, by partnering with the Foursquare App. Moped also allowed all registered users to perform complex tasks by using multiple apps at the same time, with the help of the integrated IFTTT (if this, then that) app.

Cause of Failure

The main reason why Moped didn’t take off was that it had not enough entertaining and fast-growing content of the kind that could attract a broad mass of users to join. They tried refreshing the old content by integrating a new feature which nonetheless was not recognized as something groundbreaking in the era where other social apps with similar features already enjoyed growing popularity.

Moped was unable to see that without significant revenues and with their old and outdated content, they could not stand a chance in competing with other similar social apps. Despite their efforts and the new ideas they implemented, they attracted a disappointingly small group of users but lost a greater amount of its initial user base. The popularity and the number of users saw a steady decrease. That defeat led to the loss of all their revenue and they couldn’t find someone to invest in additional rounds. Moped officially closed and was bought by Berlin-based company 6Wunderkinder which was in turn acquired by Microsoft in 2015.

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