# Kiko (2005 – 2006)

- URL: https://girisimcikafasi.com/en/startup-graveyard/kiko/
- Sector: Consumer apps
- Country: United States
- Total funding: unknown
- Cause of closure: Lost to competitors

## What did it do?

Kiko was an online calendar service that brought the features of desktop calendar software to the browser with an Ajax interface. A start-up from Y Combinator's very first batch, it offered users a free calendar and developers an API. It aimed to develop an enterprise version.

## Why did it shut down?

About a month after Kiko went live, Google Calendar launched and overshadowed the start-up. The company could not make money from its free users and never brought its planned enterprise product to life. Co-founder Justin Kan later admitted that they had built the product without talking to users. In August 2006 the site was put up for auction on eBay and sold to Tucows.

## The story

In August 2006 an unusual listing appeared on eBay: up for sale was an internet company. The founders of an online calendar service called Kiko had put the site up for auction with an opening price of $50,000. According to the listing, the site drew around 40,000 visitors a month. A start-up that had only recently been greeted with praise had turned into a listing in search of a buyer.

Kiko was founded by Justin Kan and Emmett Shear, childhood friends who had grown up in the same Seattle neighbourhood and been classmates at Yale. In 2005 the pair were accepted into the first batch of Paul Graham's Y Combinator and set up the Massachusetts-based company. Their goal was to build a calendar that combined the power of Microsoft Outlook with Gmail's modern take on the web. Written in Ruby on Rails, offering an API and catching the eye with its sleek interface, Kiko won praise on technology blogs.

However, as Vox recounted in 2014, about a month after Kiko went live Google Calendar launched and overshadowed the start-up. According to TechCrunch's write-up of its closure, the company could not make money from its free users and never brought its planned enterprise solution to life; the online calendar market was already crowded in any case. Years later, in a talk at a start-up event, Kan said they had never talked to users and that this had been a huge mistake.

In the final two minutes of the auction the price jumped by more than $100,000, and Kiko was sold to Tucows for around $250,000; Vox puts the figure at $258,000. Some 14 months after it was founded, the company changed hands, and the story was over for its founders. As Kan tells it, the pair, who had expected $50,000 at most, felt they had “won the lottery”. That money kept them going: in 2007 they received backing from Y Combinator a second time and founded Justin.tv, the platform that years later became Twitch.

Kiko shows the risk of building a product without allowing for the possibility that a giant rival will enter the same category. It is also a reminder that a small, well-timed exit can fund the founders' next, far bigger attempt.

## Lessons

- If your product is a natural extension of a giant like Google, choose a niche it will not serve, such as the appointment-booking needs of a particular industry.
- Talk to your target users before you start writing code; testing the need and the willingness to pay through conversation is cheaper than months of development.
- Closing down a product that is not working with a small sale can buy the team capital and time for its next attempt.

## Sources

- [Kiko Flatlines](https://techcrunch.com/2006/08/16/ajax-calendar-kikocom-goes-on-ebay-offers-to-delete-accounts/)
- [Interview With Kiko Acquiror Elliot Noss](https://techcrunch.com/2006/09/06/interview-with-kiko-acquiror-elliot-noss/)
- [How Twitch’s Founders Turned an Aimless Reality Show Into a Video Juggernaut](https://www.vox.com/2014/7/5/11628568/how-twitchs-founders-turned-an-aimless-reality-show-into-a-video)
- [How A Site That Streams People Playing Video Games Became A Billion Dollar Business](https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/mattlynley/how-a-site-that-streams-people-playing-video-games-became-a)