Coderwall wasn&#x27;t built on Assembly, it was owned by one of the Assembly co-founders and they brought it onto the platform, but little work happened to it once it was on the platform.<p><pre><code>    It was a good system, really, and resulted in some 
    pretty neat projects. That said, I&#x27;m not surprised 
    to see it being shuttered. A while back they pivoted 
    most of their tools [...]
</code></pre>
Their platform was very good. The pivot only happened quite recently, it seemed like a last ditch attempt to build a product that could generate interest rather than a mistake that caused the death of Assembly.<p>My take is that Assembly (the original platform) failed because for a project (being developed on the platform) to succeed it needs passionate people heavily invested in a vision for the project: the majority of projects created on Assembly didn&#x27;t have this, they had people who thought &quot;this is cool&quot; and were willing to contribute an hour or 2, but they lacked passionate leaders. 100 people who think &quot;this is cool&quot; aren&#x27;t worth 1 that thinks &quot;this is the future, I&#x27;m putting everything I have into this&quot;. Most projects on Assembly effectively limped from contributor to contributor.<p>Buckets was a good example of a project being built on Assembly that had the chance to succeed because there was a lead developer who was driving it forward, he was very passionate, had a vision and invested a lot of his time into it, and others were providing value even if they just dedicated an hour or so.<p>Assembly (the company) probably would have had a better chance of succeeding if they had built the platform and then had their employees focused on leading projects, being the passionate leaders projects need and giving the community a few years to grow to the point where it was self sustaining. Firesize is a good example of what was possible, but unfortunately that was only one of a few projects that had passionate people involved.<p>I really liked Assembly and it&#x27;s a shame it didn&#x27;t work out. I think the idea has a chance one day but it needs time to grow organically, I don&#x27;t think it can work as a VC backed company that is expected to grow however many percent month on month...