Cam.ly

Dane Jensen and Rhett Creighton saw an opportunity in the emerging wifi camera market. Rhett, an experienced entrepreneur who had already built several internet startups, came up with the idea for Cam.ly. Dane, a web software developer with a mathematics degree from Brown University, was brought on as co-founder. Their product concept was simple but ambitious: create wifi cameras that could stream and store video in the cloud—directly competing with early players like Dropcam, which would eventually become Google Nest Cams.

The team raised an angel round from friends and family and spent approximately 5 months building the product. Rather than designing cameras from scratch, they bought off-the-shelf IP cameras from China, made firmware modifications, and built a web video hosting service in Rails to connect everything together. "The product was pretty technically difficult," Dane recalls. "We had lots of obstacles designing a good consumer experience." They launched on Reddit and Hacker News, and even built creative marketing stunts like a pinata-busting machine that they streamed using their service to generate buzz.

To gain traction, the team reached out to popular electronics critics and offered them free access to the product in hopes of getting reviews. They also leveraged community platforms like Reddit and Hacker News. Of their strategies, Dane noted that "the marketing stunts worked the best." However, he acknowledged a critical limitation: "If our product were more polished I think giving it to popular critics would have been more successful."

Despite the creative marketing and technically sound engineering, Cam.ly couldn't cross the chasm from hacker-friendly to consumer-friendly. The core problem was brutal and unforgiving: the product worked for engineers but was a nightmare for ordinary people to set up and use. Famous electronics critics wouldn't even write reviews because the product "just wasn't consumer-friendly enough yet." The team was running on minimal angel funding while trying to build everything themselves—from web servers to camera firmware. They had no clear plan for raising the next round of funding needed to achieve product-market fit.

Dane's reflection on the failure is candid: "In the end, the business shut down because we failed to build a polished product in a short time and convince investors that we were worth betting on." He even received a rejection email from Paul Graham at Y Combinator saying: "you seem like good hackers but your product doesn't seem good enough yet." The competition had advantages: they were better connected, had raised more money, and many had worked at top tech companies like Microsoft and Apple.

Looking back, Dane's advice is unambiguous: "I would have told him you need to either focus on making this a product that your mom can use or the other path to success is to prove to a VC or other investor that you're a good bet and spend all your time raising money and not on the product. Don't split your time between product and fundraising." He believes they had a strong team and good business instincts but lacked the runway to iterate toward product-market fit. The lesson: for a hardware product competing with well-funded rivals, you either need to obsessively perfect the user experience before launch or commit entirely to fundraising—never both at once.