Today was the day I took the final steps to shutdown pikuzone. Created to provide a safe place for kids to be able to send emails to parent-approved contacts, it served several thousand messages for several hundred kids over the site’s three year life. It is being retired because of a cultural and a commercial shift.
Culturally, the children gravitated toward the tablets and smart-mp3 players. They utilize games and secure text messaging applications and, just like Facebook, email is the old people’s platform.
Commercially, the size of the market served is limited to parents who care about privacy and security of electronic communication. Many of these parents are hard to find and, therefore, expensive to market to as they themselves like to not be found :). Out of various marketing approaches we attempted, the one that worked best was Google Adwords – adwords that targeted highly-educated moms from blue states with two or more kids. Unfortunately, the size of the market didn’t leave the project to be commercially viable and we have run its course.
At the end of the day, the project paid for its daily operation costs but the commercial realities would never recoup the effort expended in creating the site. We end the company in black, notwithstanding development costs. Thanks to all the parents and friends who supported Erin, Joe and me in this wild adventure.