Sent the following email to the investor addresses:
Hi all,
Suggest this email is passed onto senior management, it will likely be of interest.
Thought I’d let you all know that Memrise, the beneficiary of your pooled investment, is making a catastrophic mistake that is already losing it money.
Yesterday, Memrise announced it was scrapping user-created content and moving it to a browser-platform called Decks with no app and no offline capability.
For many users, the community and user-created content is Memrise’s USP - what differentiates it and makes it unique in a saturated market of language apps. Its proprietary courses work for some, but are of pedestrian quality, limited value, cover limited languages, and have a very low ceiling in terms of learner level. The ability to create custom courses, advanced courses, and courses for niche-languages are what makes Memrise amazing to us. And we as the user base are creating the content free of charge! You’re welcome, Memrise!
The announcement yesterday has been hit by an overwhelmingly negative response from Memrise’s core users. There are already 583 responses to the forum post, most of them damning (Important Update: Upcoming changes to Memrise community-created courses). Search for a positive response, or better, search for needles in a field of haystacks. Users have made it clear that the migration of content to Decks is a deal-breaker, a decision in direct opposition to their customer needs.
Many, including myself, have terminated their Pro memberships and have no intentions of resubscribing unless this disastrous decision is reversed. I dread to think how much Memrise have lost in the last day in terms of subscriptions. Nor do I think this is a disgruntled minority of whingers - if the forum is any measure, there will be more of this to come. A quick glance at the Play Store, App Store, and Google Maps entry show that the public negative reviews in response to this decision are starting to mount.
We are all hoping Memrise see sense and swerve away from quite a terrible idea. We would love to keep using the app as we have always done, and that will not be possible with the proposed Deck migration.
Hope that you will also exert pressure on our behalf - as a business decision, this is an utterly bewildering act of self-harm.
Houssam, user of Memrise since 2014