We Tried and Failed . . . Chat is Dead

[Joshua Dorkin]

Hey Guys - 

One of the most challenging parts of running an online company is figuring out the kinds of features that your users want and will use.  Unfortunately, you'll often hear from your vocal users about a feature and assume that it is something that everyone wants or will use.  Sometimes you even decide that those features make for a better product.

Many times through the history of BiggerPockets, we've launched features that we've ultimately killed off and today marks the day we do it once again.

We launched a live chat feature on the site thinking that it would improve the interactivity of BP.  We assumed that people would be excited to connect in real time with their colleagues and we expected this feature to be a big hit.  Over the years, we've had countless requests for user to user chat and eventually launched the feature.

I believe we did a pretty solid job with it and I ended up using it daily to interact with the community.

Unfortunately, that wasn't the case for the community at large. Our adoption was pretty terrible and in the end, the cost of keeping the feature for the small handful of people that actually used it was too high.

As such, I'm sorry to announce to those few people that actually found the tool handy, that we have killed off our chat feature.

We aren't chucking the code in the trash and may decide to bring it back in some other capacity in the future, but for now, we bid adieu to chat.

Thanks for the understanding, and hopefully next time we get it right!