A cool and candid post-mortem from the founder of Gowalla

This piece by Gowalla founder Josh Williams in Medium.com is a great recapitulation of the "check-in wars" from 2008-2011, when location based services like Gowalls and Foursquare emerged (to be joined by Facebook) and fought to establish this new turf in the online world. Gowalla was a casualty of this war, and Williams' candid recounting of the story is a service to other tech entrepreneurs. While he doesn't directly deal with mistakes that contributed to Gowalla's downfall, the story helpfully lays out the extreme uncertainty that comes with any new venture (especially online ventures). Here's a taste:

In one of the many highlights of Gowalla, we crafted an amazing tie-in with Disney that was loved by both our community and theirs. Each of these endeavors cost us time and money. Unfortunately the relative payoff for us was simply less due to network effect.

While Gowalla continued to grow, the trajectory was not what it needed to be. At least not in terms of winning the game we had chosen to play.

We were the younger, prettier, but less popular sister of Foursquare. And even that had changed. In time, Foursquare had dramatically improved the design and experience of its service. This was no longer a defensible platform for us as a company.

Around this time we knew that our path was in trouble.