Dopplr

What did it do?

Dopplr was a free social network that let users share their travel plans and see which acquaintances would be in the same city on the same dates. The service also calculated the carbon footprint of journeys, and in later years offered a social atlas of user recommendations for cities.

Why did it shut down?

Founded in London in 2007 by Marko Ahtisaari, Matt Biddulph and Matt Jones, Dopplr was backed by well-known angel investors such as Reid Hoffman and Joichi Ito. Nokia announced on 28 September 2009 that it had bought the company. According to a September 2010 report in The Guardian, Dopplr's blog had stopped being updated two days after the acquisition, and monthly unique users had fallen from 39,000 to 29,000. The service stayed open for four more years. With a notice posted on the home page in October 2013, Nokia shut Dopplr down on 1 November 2013.

The story

Dopplr was born in 2007 in Silicon Roundabout, the London district where tech start-ups clustered. Named after Christian Doppler, the physicist who discovered the Doppler effect, the service asked frequent-travelling professionals a simple question: who do you know who will be in the city you are going to, on those dates? Users added their trip plans, and Dopplr showed journeys that overlapped with their friends'. The service also calculated the carbon footprint of journeys.

The founders, Marko Ahtisaari, Matt Biddulph and Matt Jones, won backing from well-known names in the tech world. In the first round Martin Varsavsky, Joichi Ito, Reid Hoffman and The Accelerator Group, run by Saul Klein, invested; the second round, in autumn 2008, was joined by names such as Esther Dyson and Joshua Schachter. In a survey of technology leaders conducted by Guardian Media Group in early 2008, Dopplr was named among the companies to watch.

On 28 September 2009 Nokia announced that it had bought Dopplr. But the acquisition did not mark the beginning of a new period of growth for the service. A year later The Guardian wrote that Dopplr's blog had stopped being updated two days after the acquisition and that monthly unique users had fallen from 39,000 to 29,000.

The service lived on for a while as a social atlas of city recommendations. In October 2013 Nokia posted a notice on the Dopplr home page: the service would end on 1 November 2013, and users could access their data until then. Like many small social products sold to big companies, Dopplr got lost among its new owner's priorities.

Lessons for founders

• When selling to a big company, be clear about where your product fits in the buyer's strategy; otherwise the team scatters and the product slowly fades.
• Creating network effects is hard in an area used as infrequently as travel; design a habit that brings users back between trips too.
• Well-known investors and buzz in tech circles are no substitute for mass-market growth; test your product with users beyond the early adopters too.

Sources

1. Dopplr (Wikipedia)
2. Dopplr home page announcing that the service would end on 1 November 2013 (archived copy) (Internet Archive, 2013-10-24)
3. Dopplr, a trip-sharing site for the jet set (VentureBeat, 2007-09-04)
4. The slow death of Dopplr (The Guardian, 2010-09-10)

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