People. Lethal choice of CEO. I'll avoid names if you don't mind. Our product was essentially like Twilio, to start with at least, until the company was dragged into a more social arena (with deals with then big, now defunct social networks). We had some pretty cool features like the ability to trigger calls, sms chats, voice blasts etc, via text commands ("call humpty, dumpty and numpty tomorrow at 5pm", or "text johnny, bonny and sonny: Hi guys"), so you could communicate with the system via IM, email, web etc. We then essentially took all that lovely stuff and instead of being the API behind Telephony, or even the Telephony behind the social, we did stupid marketing stunts for some singers and stuff like that.

The whole story is a fascinating tale of human nature more than technology. Maybe one day...

Wow, very interesting. Thank you for sharing. It seems like the moral of the story is to follow the money as Twilio did. B2B may be boring but at least they pay you.

What was the thought about where the "marketing stunts" would lead? More consumer-focused product would lead to your company becoming the next AT&T or something?

There was no thought behind it. Not rational anyway. Hence it was death by Lethal CEO. We the founders were kindly removed from the company not far from its actual demise.

And yes - I would take B2B any time. B2C is hard and requires twice the luck B2B does. When you provide a service to businesses, if your service adds value, they will buy it. When you deal with consumers, you have to be trendy, at the right place and time, cool, exciting, amazing, talked about, add value or not - who cares, etc. That startup started as a B2B idea, and morphed fairly arrogantly to a hip wannabe consumer app.