Color Labs

A photo-sharing app that raised $41 million before launch and never found a use anyone wanted.

What it did

Color was a mobile app for proximity-based photo sharing: it automatically showed you photos taken by other nearby users, forming spontaneous shared albums with no friends or follows. It launched in March 2011.

Who it was for

Smartphone users in dense, social settings who, the team assumed, would share photos openly with strangers nearby.

Why it failed

Color launched a confusing product built on a behavior users did not want, sharing photos with nearby strangers, and it required local density it never achieved. The large pre-launch raise set expectations the product could not meet.

The biggest mistake

Raising and launching at massive scale on an untested behavior with a severe cold-start problem, instead of proving the core interaction first.

Lessons learned

Money is not product-market fit. Behaviors that depend on network density have to be proven in one dense pocket before they can spread. A confusing first run is very hard to recover from.

What we'd do differently

Prove the core interaction in a single dense community, earn density before spending on scale, and keep expectations modest until the behavior is real.

Sources

Wikipedia, Color Labs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_Labs TechCrunch, Color: We Are Not Shutting Down: https://techcrunch.com/2012/10/17/color-says-not-shutting-down/