Third Pivot’s The Charm? Events Site Ravn Becomes Flash Sales Site Touch Of Modern

No one ever called a limit on the number pivots a company can do, right? So here’s the latest at a company we’ve been watching for a while now. RAVN, an event planning and sharing app that itself was the product of a pivot from the developers behind “experiences marketplace” Skyara, has sent a letter out to its users telling them that the app is getting shut down at the end of this month. In RAVN’s place, the founders are starting up yet another business — their third — also loosely based around events but with a decidedly more commercial bent: a design flash sales site called Touch of Modern.

“After two years of building a new marketplace for experiences, we have decided that it is time to close down RAVN. The website and mobile app will completely stop working by the end of the month,” the RAVN team wrote in the note to users.

“We’ve had a great time helping people discover unique events and experiences they wouldn’t have found anywhere else. And we thank you for being a part of that experience.”

There is no word on how many users RAVN has picked up since its launch in November 2011, but the three founders behind the projects – Jonathan Wu, Dennis Liu and Steven Ou — clearly have the ear and eye of the investment community behind them. Skyara received seed funding from i/o Ventures of an undisclosed amount; and then when the RAVN pivot happened, that picked up some seed money, too, this time from HillsVen Capital — again, for an undisclosed amount.

When RAVN launched, it had amassed a database of 13,000 events, with the idea that users of the app could find and book events near a specific location, share that event with friends, get access to exclusive events, and keep all of that together in a planner — a little like Time Out meeting Gogobot or Tripbirds or one of the many other social travel/event apps out there.

What RAVN might have lacked was a commercial enough element to transform the app into a viable business. That seems to effectively be what they are getting in spades with their newest effort. Touch Of Modern, they say, will be starting its first flash sale at the end of this month. Users of the RAVN app are being offered a $5 credit towards those sales — although there is no indication of whether that represents a typical price for an item or a small discount.

We have contacted RAVN and Touch of Modern to try to get more information about both — what hapened with RAVN, and why the move to flash design sales, and what happens to the team and past funding. We’ll update this post as we learn more.