All things must come to an end

When I started working on this post the question that immediately came to my mind was this: How do I start such an announcement…? Maybe a retrospect view on my naïve old self makes sense.

When I started my entrepreneurial journey I dreamt of the day where I can publish a blog post or a statement about our huge success. A successful acquisition, maybe even an IPO.

Glamourous, glorious, a winner.

Instead, I have to inform our customers, users, and everyone who cares about us about our decision to discontinue the further development of InfluencerDB and eventually take the product offline at the end of March 2021.

This decision did not come easy and we did everything in our power to prevent it, but we need to accept the fact that Facebook has decided to not provide us with access to their Graph API which leaves us unable to pursue our vision of helping companies build a true Influencer Community with our software.

We are heartbroken and devastated by this decision which we did not expect and which we do not consider fair. As I said, we did everything in our power to prove our value to Facebook as well as our compliance with their terms, but we were not heard. After many years of being a supporter and strong advocate for their platforms and Instagram in particular we need to accept the reality that we are not welcome there anymore.

We will reach out to all our customers over the upcoming days to discuss the next steps. I personally want to thank everyone who trusted us, worked with us and believed in us. I am devastated that I will not be able to fulfill promises, even the implicit ones, that were made and want to apologize for any negative consequences that this might have caused or will cause for anyone who worked with our product.

These are the facts, now to the more emotional and personal part.

Over the last 6 years, a lot of great individuals plus myself dedicated a tremendous amount of energy and passion to developing a great technology product to help companies truly succeed when working with influencers. If you counted my first startup, which was the breeding ground for InfluencerDB, towards the journey it would already be 9 years of envisioning, building, educating, convincing, and hustling in the influencer space.

I am incredibly thankful for everyone who joined me on this journey, who fought alongside me and the rest of the team in this hyper-dynamic market with a lot of competition while juggling the dependency of the biggest social media platforms.

A special thank you goes out to Alexandra, Mona, Dan, Ramu, Jon, David, André, Louisa, Lars, Matthias, Martina, Kaushal, Michi, Florian, Artem, Roman, Nico, Nataliya, Tiemo, Hendrik, Benedikt, Philipp, Sophie, Astrid, Jonathan, Bernard, Qui, Khris, Spencer, Ellie, Brian, Antoine, Andrey, Ruben, Ruben, Raffael, German and everyone else that was part of this journey.

When we started InfluencerDB in 2015 we quickly became a leading innovator in the space. We were helping a lot of young Direct-to-Consumer brands build small empires enabled by their effective and scaled influencer marketing programs which were, in turn, enabled to a good part by us.

It makes me proud to say we were able to provide major help to a lot of global eCommerce winners. Additionally, we were able to work closely with amazing global enterprises that showed us how traditional companies can succeed with influencers. Last but not least, a shout-out goes out to the cutting-edge, data-driven, and customer-centric agency clients we had.

We did all this without ever raising money from a traditional VC, and competed with companies that raised double-digit million dollar amounts.

Over the years we developed a culture driven by empathy, trust, transparency, ambition, learning, and sharing. In retrospect, I consider this our strongest asset and the reason we were very successful.

For me personally, it was an incredible ride for almost a decade and despite the fact that the ending is not what I was looking for, I am very thankful for all the people I met, the experiences I went through and the learnings I made. I believe I am a much better person, leader, and professional now than I was when I started my entrepreneurial journey and this can not be taken away from me.

I am looking forward to the future that, potentially, will not be in the influencer space anymore. I have not made a decision about this yet, but over the last years, I became more and more passionate about putting my energy, brain, and all I have to give professionally, to work for something that improves the world.

Climate Change prevention is the topic that I care the most about from the broad set of challenges we face as humanity. For now, I will use the upcoming weeks and months to recharge, find new inspiration, learn more about what can be done to stop global warming and spend significantly more time with my family and hobbies that I didn’t find time for over the last years.

That being said, I’m more than happy to share my knowledge, perspective, and experiences about the space, entrepreneurship, and technology, so please feel free to reach out to me via LinkedIn in case you are interested in this. Also, I’m happy to get in touch with anyone passionate about climate change prevention to discuss ideas, opportunities, and challenges.

Thank you for reading this, stay healthy and all the best,

Robert