A great start-up postmortem of a social network, written by our own @markmhendrickson. This one is a decade old but it still holds up.
The Uphill Battle Of Social Event Sharing: A Post-Mortem for Plancast | TechCrunch
Nearly three years ago, I left my position at TechCrunch to start my own Internet business, with the idea of creating a web application that’d help people get together in real-life rather than simply helping them connect online as most social networking applications had done. Alas, our efforts began to stall after several months post-launch, and we were never able to scale beyond a small early adopter community and into critical, mainstream usage. While the initial launch and traction proved extremely exciting, it misled us into believing there was a larger market ready to adopt our product. This post-mortem is an attempt to describe the fundamental flaws in our product model and, in particular, the difficulties presented by events as a content type.
techcrunch.com