Financing in April, bankruptcy in August, female Xueba founded “Fan Circle Metaverse” Nai He Meng Broken Seed Round

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Wrong business model = premature death

Author | Wang Wang Editor | Man Man Zhou

Source: Silicon Rabbit Race

Source of the first image: Tenor

Shock! What makes a late-stage procrastinator get up at seven in the morning to write?

It is a startup company that appears at the speed of light, finances at the speed of light, and closes at the speed of light: Kangaroo. Information about this company is disappearing in the Internet world little by little, and there may be no trace if it is not written quickly.

PS. There are too many companies called Kangaroo, and their logos are similar. For example, the “Security Bingcheng” shared by Silicon Rabbit Race is also called Kangaroo (Extended reading: It is no longer exclusive to rich people, but also in the field of home security.) “Misue Ice City” is here!).

01

Fan economy + Web3, Kangaroo wins

In the 360 ​​lines, if you want to say who earns the best money, fans who love to generate electricity and “Web3 Leeks” who are “silly and rich” are estimated to rank in the top ten. Kangaroo is such a new interactive story game platform that combines the fan economy and the Web3 trend.

Interactive story refers to a form of entertainment in which the audience makes a choice on a specific plot set by the creator and affects the direction of the entire plot.

This kind of gameplay has long been common in the gaming industry. From the reasoning RPG games in the early years to the phenomenal Detroit Become Human in recent years, they essentially belong to this category.

The 2018 Netflix series “Black Mirror Bandersnatch” may be the first time that interactive, multi-ending movie viewing has attracted attention and discussion. Since then, there have also been a number of productivity tool manufacturers producing interactive stories on the market, such as Many novel writers, video writers, and game writers, such as Bilibili in China and Interlude overseas, have devoted themselves to the new creative genre of interactive stories.

The uniqueness of Kangaroo is that it superimposes the two buffs of fans and Web3.

In the world of fans (whether it is two-dimensional or three-dimensional, whether it is a star or an internet celebrity), there is an activity full of vitality: fan creation.

This concept, which grew out of the ACG circle, originally meant “self-created, self-created creations that are not affected by business” by fans. Specifically, fan creation refers to the secondary creation based on the basic settings of the original work, such as character design, storyline, world view, etc., and the form is not limited to novels, paintings, music, radio dramas, video clips, games, etc.

Now, fan culture has spread to a wider circle of fans, you can see historical fans, and even cross-dimensional lalang, such as the famous “Lin Daiyu X Voldemort”.

For fans, creating and circulating fan works is a way of expressing love, and for “true masters”, it is also a means of reflecting popularity and attracting fans. Some advertisers even use “whether there is a fandom” as one of the criteria for judging the popularity of celebrities/nets.

However, fan creations that use love to generate electricity often face heavy blows from the commercial society.

The use of celebrity/net celebrity images, work IP, and original materials for secondary creation is likely to cause infringement. The consequences range from being deleted and removed from the shelves, or even a lawyer’s letter warning, and even losing money.

Kangaroo provides a safe haven for fans who love fandom culture. The platform has signed up a group of Hollywood artists, TikTok celebrities, and even NFT images. Users can use their images to create interactive stories. Of course, users can also pinpoint their own image on Kangaroo, meet their favorite celebrities in interactive stories, and share their works on the site, or forward them to social platforms such as TikTok.

Kangaroo wouldn’t get as much attention if it were just an interactive story creation platform. Next, we have to talk about its connection with Web3.

Kangaroo is not an ordinary community, but a metaverse built by platforms, IP partners and fans.

The Metaverse has a built-in “semi-finished storyline”, which is equivalent to the basis of the main storyline of this universe. IP partners use their own and fans’ avatars to perform together, enrich the plot content, and tell the story. In Kangaroo, fans can not only chase stars, but also have the opportunity to co-star in a video and a story with idols. In the words of the founder of Kangaroo, “Let fans enter a Hollywood they have never entered before.”

In addition to the Hollywood actor Kiernan Shipka (also one of the co-founders of Kangaroo), the IP partners of Kangaroo, TikTok celebrities Bailey Spinn, Baby Ariel, star chef Flynn McGarry, etc., also include the virtual image Puff Puff and NFT projects on TikTok. Woodies.

Since the company’s short-term goal is still to expand the number of users, there is very little information on the public business model. In the only media interviews, the founder said that in the future, he will take a cut from in-site transactions such as skin purchases and work promotion.

Unfortunately, as of August 2022, Kangaroo’s story has to come to an end.

02

Get Hollywood and Silicon Valley,

Kangaroo’s Brilliant and Short Life

Kangaroo’s founder, Katie Mishra, got the idea for the startup while she was at Stanford University and completed the beta version of the product. Before formally establishing the company, she found two partners: co-founder Maria Zlatkova, a former software engineer at Instagram, who was involved in the development of the Stories feature; another co-founder, Kiernan Shipka, who starred in the hit American TV series “Mad Men” , Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, and an Instagram blogger with 8 million followers.

The three surveyed Shipka’s more than 4,000 fans about what they wanted to implement in the app. In 2020, the parent company Pili Studios was established. In April 2021, Kangaroo went online and announced the completion of a $3.3 million seed round led by Human Capital, other investors including Greylock Partners and Ambridge Capital, as well as Michael Ovitz, founder of brokerage firm CAA, A-grade Investments Partner Abe Burns, professional poker player Phil Hellmuth, entertainment industry lawyer Kevin Yorn and other individual investors.

In the financing news, founder Mishra said that the financing will be used to expand the team and sign more IPs, while predicting that there will be more officially announced partners.

However, just four months later, Mishra announced the closure of the company. It is unclear whether Kangaroo will be back online in the future, and Mishra himself did not respond to outside inquiries.

Not only that, information about Kangaroo also disappeared from the Internet at an extremely fast speed: the official website was closed in the blink of an eye (the author was still researching in the last second, and the website was 404 in the next second); Instagram, TikTok, Discord and other social platforms have already closed. There is no such number, only the last update of Twitter and LinkedIn remains in June 2022; the product has also been removed from the iOS and Android stores.

From the few words, it is speculated that the reason for the closure of the company is that the business is not focused enough to make it unsustainable.

Mishra said in a LinkedIn update released on August 17 that the ultimate vision of the three founders is to “democratize interactive media”, for which they attract partners, list on multiple platforms, and even try to personalize AI technology. The founding team believes that there is always one hit when casting a net, but the cruel reality is that if a startup does not have a competitive product, it will fail with a high probability of spending a lot of manpower and material resources to attack in all directions.

03

Fail fast, fail better?

A few years ago, in the “Great Leap Forward” era of entrepreneurship, there was a widely circulated saying: “fail fast, fail better”, which means that entrepreneurs should try and make mistakes quickly, and each failure means that they can do it next time. better. Especially for companies in the early stage of entrepreneurship, the mortality rate has been quite high, and many founders have been honed to become serial entrepreneurs again and again.

Crunchbase data shows that as of August 15, 232 startups have fallen in 2022, of which seed rounds, pre-seed rounds, A rounds, angel rounds and B rounds have the highest mortality rates.

Looking at this death list, there are many companies like Kangaroo that are living and dying: Nudj Health, established in 2021, announced the completion of $10 million in Series A financing in April 2022; Inveztor, established in 2020, announced the completion of 130 in May 2022. £10,000 Pre seed round financing; Genity, established in 2018, completed a $6.25 million seed round financing in February 2021…

Most of the reasons for their failure are similar to Kangaroo’s: they haven’t found the right business model, and investors don’t transfuse blood as fast as the company bleeds. This is especially deadly in the context of today’s sluggish environment.

Mythia, a YC 2021 alumni enterprise NFT software platform, is also struggling to make ends meet in 2022, and its founder sincerely dissects the company’s costs in a blog post. According to his calculations, the company should earn $40,000 a month in order to break even, while the actual monthly revenue is $0 due to an unreasonable business model.

As early as 2016, a16z partner Marc Andreessen expressed that rapid trial and error is only applicable to daily tactics, while rapid trial and error at the strategic and target level is disastrous. Even in the early stages of starting a business, entrepreneurs should prepare in two ways: think clearly about long-term goals and stick to them, and flexibly adjust short-term strategies. In other words, tactical diligence must not mask strategic laziness.

Back to the Kangaroo story. The three founders have temporarily bid farewell to their short entrepreneurial careers. Mishra is still thinking about a career direction, Zlatkova is continuing to complete her MBA studies, and Shipka is also an actor and Internet celebrity blogger. Maybe one day in the future, we can still see them in the entrepreneurial circle.

PS. It is also called Kangaroo, but the name is different. It can be seen that it is very important for the company to have a good name.

PPS. Since there are really few public reports on Kangaroo, it is difficult to search for its news with various keywords. So in the process of collecting information, I was forced to watch a lot of cute/funny videos of kangaroos, and I got some solace in this sad story.

References:

• Here’s how a recent Stanford grad is trying to transform how influencers and fans interact (The Business Journals)

• Why venture capitalist Marc Andreessen is critical of the ‘fail fast’ startup mentality (Geek Wire)

• Kangaroo Rolls Out Metaverse Storytelling App (PR Newswire)

• Mythia is closing down its software (Medium)

• Crunchbase

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