Stepped down as CEO, voted out as director

A day after the micro-blogging app announced that it will shut down on 28 Feb, Cheo Ming Shen, Dayre founder and its former boss, wrote a love note to Dayre, saying that time has come to say goodbye to the "passion project of mine".

Cheo was the CEO of Netccentric Limited until Jan 2017, which owns Dayre and blog advertising community Nuffnang.

After resigning as CEO, Cheo was also voted out as a director of Netccentric in November 1 last year.

This means that Cheo has no say in management decisions at the point of its shutting down.

Dayre's delightful start

Dayre was launched on November 8, 2013, and was off to a good start immediately.

Without any marketing safe for some word of mouth marketing from key bloggers in Singapore, Malaysia and the UK, Dayre had a gain of more than 60,000 users in its first month.

Over the years, Dayre has become the medium for young Singaporeans, especially women, who want to blog about their daily lives.

By its first year, Dayre had over 500,000 downloads and active users.

Goodbye my lover

Late last night, Cheo wrote a heartfelt post about his Dayre journey.

Titled "Goodbye my lover... Dayre.me", Cheo shared his experiences of his first blog, and how he dreamed about the concept of Dayre because of his belief in telling one's story.

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Cheo believed that Dayre combined all the daily social media habits of people and introduced a structure to it, thus successfully providing a story of a person’s day.

New CEO, original team dismantled

More importantly, Cheo revealed that he initially had a plan in place for Dayre.

Cheo said that part of the plan was to raise funds, which he successfully did, via an initial public offering in 2015 in Australia.

Cheo's second part of his plan was the gradual introduction and ramping up of a premium subscription model, called Dayre Plus, a subscription model based on introducing new features over time.

However, his plans for Dayre were unfortunately reversed after he stepped down as CEO of Netccentric in Feb 2017.

To make things worse, Cheo's Dayre team was dismantled.

Cheo also disagreed with the new CEO's decision to make Dayre Plus heavily discounted, as it would have affected its pathway to financial sustainability.

Moreover, Cheo felt that "significant new developments of features on the app were seemingly de-prioritised".

With a lack of love and passion, there are only memories left in Dayre

Cheo concluded that the Dayre "app and community heads out with a whimper, instead of the roar when it was first launched by my team".

Cheo added,

"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."

In parting, Cheo shared the 100 personalized (many hand drawn) birthday cards in the mail on Dayre's first birthday.

Unfortunately, Dayre will not grow to be a 5-year old child this year.

And the sad conclusion of this journey of memories is that the founder of Dayre had decided to pen down all these one-day thoughts in his own blog, and not his Dayre account.

Top photo from Bossming.com

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