It was a simple premise during the height of the selfie hype: take a photo of yourself as well as what’s in front of you. It was called a “frontback.”
Now it’s called “an idea that never really got super traction.” This of course after rumors that Twitter was interested in acquiring the team and app a few years back.
Oops.
The founders joined us at Disrupt in 2013 to discuss its fast rise 200,000 downloads. At one point, someone published the question “Is Frontback the next Instagram?” Thank the lord it wasn’t us.
The company raised nearly $4M and their investors read like a who’s who in Silicon Valley investment: Alexis Ohanian, Charlie Cheever, Fuel Capital, Garry Tan, Harjeet Taggar, Index Ventures, Lerer Hippeau Ventures, Michael Arrington, Michael Birch, Susa Ventures, SV Angel, Betaworks, Hudson River Angels, Jared Hecht, Seedcamp, Steve Martocci and Taavet Hinrikus.
Jack Dorsey was a huge fan, so was Ashton Kutcher. But alas, the time has come to move onto something else. When you turn to your friend and say the name of a company and that person says “I totally forgot about them,” then this kind of thing shouldn’t surprise. The company behind Frontback is going to keep tinkering on new ideas with whatever cash it has left, one could guess.
Here’s the full message from the founder, the app will shut down on August 15th (your data is available to grab until September 15th, though):
This also isn’t the only time the company and app almost/did die. Watch this video to hear more about that:
