I don't disagree. But I wonder if the reason it was a ghost town when people reinstalled the app was precisely because it took a month for all the users to hear about it via word of mouth. If they had been able to send an email blast out to all of their users at once, perhaps there would have been enough people reinstalling the app that day to kick start it back into popularity.
Overall I find it a fascinating case study, just because they fell so quickly. If the founders wrote a memoir I would be very interested in reading it.
They did [1], but that was 3 month later and by then it seems most of their users had moved on and forgotten about them. Plus, being an anonymous app they didn't have emails for their users, so there wasn't really any way for them to get the word out that they were reverting back.
Well, they blocked the app on all US middle- and high-school campuses so it couldn't be used for bullying. But past that I wouldn't call it a rampant problem. If anything the anonymous factor prevented harassment within the app, because between posts you couldn't identify anyone, thus no one could really carry grudges or become "popular."
The main problems were the occasional bomb threat and the overall degenerate nature of some of the posts.
I wouldn't at all blame the VC's for this. Yak killed their own app overnight by taking the main feature that made it popular - the fact that it was anonymous - and making an about-face to suddenly require usernames (and strongly encourage social media integration). The fact that they thought that was a good idea in the first place, along with the fact that they didn't think that maybe they should A B test the change in a smaller market first, clearly demonstrates to me that the founders didn't know what they were doing and didn't have what it would have taken to be successful.
Before they shot themselves in the foot, they had a huge following among college students because the app was one of the best ways to get and share info on campus. You can't tell me that couldn't have been monetized. Hell, Durex could have made millions by offering $.50 off coupons on the app every night!
It's not that it couldn't have made money, the founders just didn't seem to have a realistic vision for how they were going to do so.
Last I checked, nylon was still a thermoplastic.