This will be the last post on our Company blog.
We should have probably done this a lot sooner, but with the year coming to an end, we finally decided to make this final step and officially close down the site.

Camlink was started in May 2007 and bootstrapped by the founders with the hope of eventually raising venture capital. At that time “Online Speed Dating” was a thing of the future and we thought Camlink would be the first to bring this innovative concept to market. The platform development was completed 5 months behind schedule and way over budget (over 2,500 man hours). This was also a first project for any of us that required significant capital and we had no idea how difficult the fund-raising process really is (we were looking for $2.5M). Over the last 9 months we have failed to materialize on any outside financing. Our competition was ahead of us from the day they came out of stealth mode in the fall of 2007. Since then both have secured B rounds of funding. SpeedDate has raised a total of $8.6M and WooMe raised a whopping $17.4M. The economic climate didn’t make this process easier.  It seems that we were caught about 6 months too late with our start-up. I’m not sure if we would be successful otherwise, but we would have certainly had better chances without such dominant competitors already on the market with solid traffic. If we started 6 months later, we would see the competition on the horizon and not venture in.
We’ve also chose one tough area: Consumer Internet (web2.0) and Online Dating.

We gave Camlink a few months to gain traction, but without financing it made sense for us to call an end to this venture.
This was an exciting journey for all of us. During the time we had to wear many different hats, get little sleep and learn what it is to build an internet company.

Being an an entrepreneur isn’t easy but very exciting. The things we learned and the people we met along the way will be part of the next thing, whatever it is. We want to thank everyone that has helped, challenged and motivated us!

The site will remain up for some time, only for technical demo purposes.