• General

Goodbye my Lover … Dayre.me

So I guess the Time has come to say goodbye.

For those who do not know, Dayre, the popular mobile blogging app, was a passion project of mine, when I was CEO of the Netccentric Group.

I had felt at the time, that with the massive changes and developments taking place in the Social Media World, Netccentric needed to step up to the plate, and we needed to develop something great of our own.

I dreamt up the concept of Dayre, from our first failed attempt at developing a mobile app.

I was lying in Patty’s shop (innitbangkok), analyzing where it had all gone wrong, and realised … it had gone wrong because we had tried to be “safe” with our first app.

We had tried to be the “middle man” again, when we really needed to be at the centre of it all.

We needed to get people creating their own content on our platform, versus almagating and organizing already existing content and blogs (Which we did via the failed imotiv app).

It was risky, and it was bold, and I faced resistance, but I knew that with the scene being dominated by just two big boys, Facebook and Google, we would have to have a go at it.

I never started out as a blogger, but after starting Nuffnang, I realised, I needed to stay current and understand what the fuss was all about.

You can say, I got hooked on it.

My first blog started me on a journey, I’m still deeply passionate about today. Telling one’s story.

By 2013, more than a decade after great platforms like Livejournal, blogger and wordpress had made blogging mainstream though, there was a problem. They had not developed any further. They had stagnated.

Like our incumbent businesses, the advent of mobile had disrupted their game. These platforms had no reply.

People, it seemed no longer had the time to write. They only had the time to tweet.

or … to take a perfectly curated flatlay …

And slightly later… to record a video that makes you look like a dog. (Snapchat would eventually themselves be disrupted by Facebook and Instagram).

I thought to myself that fateful day;

Were there people like me who wanted something more … more of a voice, but did not do it because there was no simple way?

So I took all these ideas, and went local …

I mixed all these concepts together, and made Rojak. Dayre was proudly made in Singapore … no argument there ;-p

The concept now seems elementary, but at the time, naysayers were abound.

Dayre combined all the daily social media habits of people, all the short form tidbits they offered up into the day, and introduced structure. An ability to tell a narrative. A story of a person’s day.

It was a bigger success than I could have imagined … with over 500,000 downloads and active users doing just that. Today newspaper even predicted it would be mainstream in one of their new year eve predictions (Must have jinxed it lol).

More than that though, and what gratified me greatly, was the treasure trove of stories that were uncovered on the platform.

And no … I’m not talking about the R21 threads, you tiko uncles …

But the stories of personal hardship, suffering, and eventual triumph.

Many of these original stories have now been lost (Either to me/or deleted), but they always gave me perspective. Even in my darkest of times.

Who can forget the account of a loving sister, and her brother who was suffering from Sepsis … and had to live life in a way most of us would shudder to imagine.

But it went EVEN further than that, when you see the responses of people who had likewise suffered, and offered hope to her …

It may seem like I’m plagiarising a Mastercard ad, but frankly …

Somethings money can’t buy …

And so to the Dayre community, and those people, who offered just a glimmer of light, to others in the trenches, I salute you and thank you sincerely. Who says Singaporeans are a materialistic bunch with no heart? (The majority of Dayre Active Users are Singaporean)

I say you showed them! 🙂 To me, you are Singaporeans of the year. 🙂

I know many of you will be sad, and seeking reasons why this has happened.

I can only tell you from my personal perspective, as the creator of Dayre, my team and I had a plan in place.

Part of that plan involved raising funds for the project, which I successfully did, via an IPO in 2015.  To the tune of 12.5 million AUD. The company as of end June 2017 still had 6.2 million SGD in bank according to their half year filings, so no, Netccentric is not bankrupt.

The second part of it, involved the gradual introduction and ramping up of a premium subscription model, called Dayre Plus (The idea was to make it increasingly worthwhile to buy a subscription by introducing new features over time).

All these plans were unfortunately reversed with my stepping down as CEO of Netccentric in Feb 2017.

From that time, my vision and association with Dayre ended, and my team was dismantled.

A new guy “took over”.

Dayre Plus was heavily discounted, (meaning the developed pathway to financial sustainability was cut off), and significant new developments of features on the app were seemingly de-prioritised.

These two things combined, meant the slow, but perhaps inevitable demise of Dayre as we knew it. And in my personal opinion, the loss of a potential powerhouse for Netccentric.

Every app, including the best, needs to constantly engage its audience with new features and developments. Dayre like the blogging platforms of old, stagnated, and got boring.

With a feeble “final” attempt at “fundraising” to make Dayre sustainable obviously unsuccessful (A single sticker sale … really?), the app and community heads out with a whimper, instead of the roar when it was first launched by my team.

Many Dayreans might have hoped for another outcome, and I, as the creator, shared that hope right to the very end … but it is a pity the folks who run Dayre today, didn’t share the love and passion I have for her, and that the plans and visions I so carefully planned did not have a chance to materialize.

I believe that if they did, perhaps Dayre, once so popular and loved, would have met with a different fate.

I would have liked for Dayre to have become as big a giant as Instagram is today … and for PM Lee to have mentioned it in his NDR as a world beater from Singapore!

For Dayre’s first birthday, I received a 100 personalized (many hand drawn) birthday cards in the mail for our community and app.

To me, they reflect that something special we built together, and inspire me to greater heights.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?gl=SG&hl=en-GB&v=X5DOGsoiW6c

“Here’s To The Night”