Making it as a social media startup ain’t easy.
Zeen, the maker of a social collage platform, confirmed to Business Insider on Monday that it was shutting down operations.
“If there was any other way to keep it going, we would’ve done that,” cofounder Miri Buckland told BI. “Ultimately, over the last couple of months, it became clear that it wasn’t going to grow to the scale that it needed to as a VC-backed startup.”
Buckland cofounded the company, which was originally called Landing, with Ellie Buckingham in 2019. It raised a total of $9 million, Buckland told BI in April. Its investors include venture capital firms like Stellation Capital, Cowboy Ventures, Chai Ventures, and others.
The company’s first product was Landing, a social media app that felt nostalgic for the 2010s days of Polyvore or Pinterest, and was a brief hit with Gen-Z users. The startup shut down the Landing app in September.
The company then rebranded to Zeen and pivoted away from building a new social media platform and toward the creator economy. It introduced a shoppable collage feature that creators could use across social media platforms, particularly Substack newsletters. Creators could easily integrate affiliate-marketing links using Zeen’s website.
“We’ve had products in many different iterations through Landing and through Zeen, and we hoped that this would be something that we could grow into a much bigger business,” Buckland said.
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Building a long-lasting, profitable social media platform isn’t an easy game. That’s one reason some investors have backed away from the category.
Other social media darlings have faced fates of either dwindling popularity or, in some cases, shutting down entirely. For instance, Poparazzi, a photo-sharing app that was a viral hit in 2021, announced it would shut down in 2023. Meanwhile, some creator economy startups have also had to face shutdowns, like film studio Creator+.
“We made the decision that now was the time to shut it down,” Buckland said. “Fundraising or becoming profitable, they weren’t viable pathways for us at this point. It’s a sad decision, honestly.”
