Joe Speiser was looking for a place to hide. It was late February 2018, and he was sitting at his desk in Manhattan, preparing to share the news that would transform his company, LittleThings, from a Cinderella story into a cautionary tale.
The problem was, there weren't many hiding places in the LittleThings office—a 30,000-square-foot open floor plan with few private rooms. Even Speiser, the company's co-founder and CEO, didn't have an office. When the good times were rolling, he liked it that way. LittleThings published feel-good videos—interviews with Real Housewives, cooking lessons with semifamous chefs, appearances by the “internet's most famous dogs”—all recorded on cheery sets, one of which included a backdrop of faux windows that ensured it was always a sunny day at headquarters.
And for the most part, it was. At its peak, LittleThings produced more than a dozen of these shows—from an hourlong daily talk show called Refresh to Oh, Baby! a series dedicated to gender reveals—and broadcast them on Facebook Live.
From the day LittleThings launched as a spinoff of a pet food company Speiser had co-founded, Facebook spread the company's videos far and wide, directing a fire hose of traffic to the startup's website. Soon, the site was bringing in more than 50 million unique visitors a month and over $50 million in annual revenue.
It wasn't lost on Speiser that all this attention from the world's biggest social media platform might be a curse. Facebook was, by then, well-known to be a capricious partner, prone to changing course and kneecapping even the most successful companies that relied on it. Speiser, a serial entrepreneur with two successful exits on his résumé, sometimes lost sleep wondering if LittleThings would be next.
But Facebook had always been good to the company. LittleThings executives had visited the social network's headquarters. They'd schmoozed with Facebook brass at Topgolf in Las Vegas and partied with them on the beach in Cannes. LittleThings had designated liaisons at Facebook, who ensured the company could test out new features. Speiser, in turn, had publicly pledged his allegiance to Facebook. During one on-air interview at Nasdaq headquarters, he encouraged entrepreneurs not to spread themselves too thinly across major platforms, but to “go all in” on one. “That's what we did with Facebook,” he said. “It's like a marriage—you're gonna have good days. You're gonna have bad days.”
Less than a year later, there had been too many bad days. In early 2018, organic traffic to the LittleThings website had tanked in the aftermath of a major Facebook algorithm change—and despite Speiser's best efforts, it showed no signs of returning. By late February, it was clear to Speiser that the marriage was crumbling.
So here he was, behind his computer screen, afraid to face his unsuspecting staffers, some of whom were, at that moment, huddled near the studio space, walking through the next day's lineup—the guests they'd booked, the bits they wanted to try. But they wouldn't get the chance. Because a little after 5 p.m., Speiser clicked send on an all-company email. The subject line: “Urgent: LittleThings Closure”
Big tech giveth, and big tech taketh
