Product Failures: Path

Rocketship.fm

Path was created in 2010 by former Facebook employee Dave Morin as a sort of anti-Facebook. It stood out with one good idea: limits for friends. You couldn’t add more than 50 people to your network when it first launched.

As Facebook ballooned in size and our friend lists grew with it, Path sought to be the place where you chatted with only the people you were closest to. And for a little while, the idea seemed to work. Quickly, Google reportedly tried to gobble it up. By mid-2013, Morin proclaimed that people were checking the app “over 1 billion times per month.”

But after years of irrelevance, it decided to finally shut its doors in 2018. What went wrong and what could have been? We explore that and more on today's episode.

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