Albumatic Pivots, Rebrands As Koa.la

Today photo-sharing startup Albumatic announced a major pivot with it they are changing the name of their company to Koala. With this change also comes a brand new domain name but it’s not a .COM, in fact it’s a domain hack using .LA, Koa.la.

koa-la

Along with the rebranding comes a shift in focus which at this moment is on the incredibly popular social network Kik. According to TechCrunch:

Basically, it sounds like the Koa.la team is hoping that messaging will become the next big social platform. He noted that Kik is already approaching 100 million users, so he argued, “If we ever run out of Kik users, we have bigger, more exciting problems.” He also argued that other messaging apps will have to follow Kik’s lead and become a platform if they “want to be more than a feature-based service.” (Source – TechCrunch)

Yes, that’s right, Kik already has 100 million users which means that Koa.la is tapping into a huge market that look to be only going up and to the right…a direction we all know and love.

So why not Koala.com? Let’s be honest. A domain like Koala.com probably comes with a nice six-figure price tag, which, a startup like Koa.la might want to buy later down the road, but at this phase given that they are focused on Kik, a .LA will do just fine.

Startups have limited budgets, this is no surprise and where they spend their money is critical to the companies success. While later down the road spending $500,000 on a domain might make sense, in the early days this money should be going into building a great team and building, building, building, and yes building some more.

Congrats to the whole team at Koa.la, they have tapped into one of the hottest social networks on the planet and it looks like that pesky product market fit puzzle might be behind them.

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton