Several executives at top dating sites have contacted me to discuss the effect the mass exodus of top management from Jangl would affect MatchTalk, which is powered by Jangl.
Today I heard back from Michael Cerda, founder of Jangl, about the current situation. Jangl was acquired by Live Universe and continues to power Match.com and Adult Friend Finder. Better than nothing but not very juicy, at least compared to the rumors I’ve heard surrounding how management deal with the company’s implosion. Sounds like management and a few engineers went to Jajah. and remaining employees are not very happy about how the deal went down.
Let me say that I was an early fan of Jangl and have used the service throughout it’s lifespan. Simple and cheap, what more can you ask for?
Audio services in the dating and social networking market have an inordinately difficult time getting traction in the marketplace. People don’t want to talk to each other, they’d rather send SMS, email or post to people’s Fun Walls. WooMe and SpeedDate may counteract this trend, but that’s how it’s been for at least several years.
TechCrunch did a piece a whole month ago which I just came across, Live Universe Picking Up Jangl’s Pieces. The TechCunch commenters, as usual, make several poignant points, yet also miss the mark when it comes to the value of Jangl services. Jangl removed a lot of the friction from the process of getting an anonymous Jangl number and making and receiving calls. g*Number and many earlier companies tried to do 80% of what Jangl accomplished, but Jangl got the signup process right. A shame really, I liked the service and thought they had a fighting chance in the dating market.
The TC commenters saying anyone with Asterisk (free open source telecommunications system) could duplicate Jangl quickly may be right, but Jangl’s ease of use was far ahead of other offerings. Most people complaining about how easy it is to build things probably haven’t even tried Jangl, let alone compared to it other anonymous calling services. It’s easy to take potshots from the comments.
To the TC commenter talking about their PR, I agree 100%. Tim Johnson is one of the best PR people in Silicon Valley, a true communications master, forgoing the smarmy PR flack BS that is so prevalent these days, especially from the myriad wet-behind-the-ears 24 year old PR associates at major dating sites call you Bruce when your name is Fred, for the fifth time already. I can count the number of PR people I look forward to hearing from on one hand, and Tim’s on that hand.
Mark Brooks was pushing a similar anonymous calling service last year. Not sure what happened to that company. I can think of at least six anonymous calling companies that are gone just in the past three years. Every one of them tried to get a foothold in the dating space, with little to show for it.
Then they sit back and lick their wounds, saying that they have shifted their focus to the much larger e-commerce market. “eBay or Craigslist will buy us, just watch.” If I had a nickel…
With Jangl, it’s a classic case of improper alignment of founders goals and investor experience. Raising money is straightforward. Finding friendly money is incredibly difficult. Many entrepreneurs go for the first deal that comes to them, refusing to wait for a better VC team to align themselves with. The value of a VC is much more than money.
Take it from someone trying to raise money for two companies. Everyone wants to hear your idea, and then they decline politely, at which point the terror sets in that some “Entrepreneur in Residence” at a VC is going to take your idea and run with it. So you go with the first money promised. BAD IDEA.
Jangl raised enough capital to build out their technology, but it sounds like they ran out of money before they could get serious traction in the dating and social networking space.
Guess having Match.com on PlentyOfFish as customers didn’t make them as much money as they expected. But then again, why did it take eight engineers to maintain the service?
Have you checked out Jajah? It used to feel more like a long distance phone call arbitrage play. Buy millions of minutes and resell them at a profit, after giving them away for a few years. Now there is a hot Asian girl on the home page kissing her phone.
I used Jajah to talk to my then-girlfriend last year when she was in Australia for a month. I never saw a bill on the my cell phone for a single call. Great service, but I never thought of it as an anonymous calling service.
In hindsight, eHarmony made the smarter play. They let Match deal with a protracted technology due diligence and integration period, with all the issues that pop up regardless of how well things are planned out for a new technology launch.
When I was on the team building a version of AOL for the Swedish government in 1995, our project was something like 10% of Netscape’s budget at the time. Once you sell someone on an idea, you actually have to make the code work. We bought the entire Netscape product line with the hopes that we could jury-rig the platform into something usable. At the time, that meant expensive Oracle consultants traveling to us from all over the world to help wrangle the Netscape code into something the customer would sign off on.
The stories I could tell from that project – $6 million dollars way back in 1995. The government even raised the price of stamps to fund the project. But I digress.
I’d love to know what the overall effort was to integrate Jajah with eHarmony. I suspect it was less resource intensive than that Jangl deal with Match.
I’m not going to talk about Michael Cerda’s leaving for Jajah because all I know is what I read, that some people are upset at how he bailed out and left Jangl to fend for itself, but who knows what really happened.
I hope that Match can salvage the situation and Live Universe can step up to the plate to keep the service going.
As for Jajah, they have 10 million customers at this point. Now who’s going to buy them? AT&T or Verizon? Scratch that, in a few years Verizon will offer anonymous calling and put the whole market out of business.
