All for respecting the dead, but I'm more curious in terms of how you can have 5 million users and still need to shut down. Any commentary on whether it's a monetization issue or more along the lines of "5 million isn't worth the VC"?
This begs the question: figure it out later once you have a lot of users or figure it out with a small number of users and then try to get a lot of users?
I dunno... that article you linked has this part in it:
"Springpad co-founder Jeff Chow, who previously worked with Janer at Third Screen Media (acquired by AOL), is joining Google in Kendall Square, along with Springpad’s top four engineers:"
Sounds exactly like an acqhire that somehow instead became a poach. And a pretty rip-the-heart-out poach too. I can't think of any start-ups that could survive that kind of talent loss. I envision some upper-management person suggesting buying SpringPad, Google-execs veto it, but said upper-management person secured the funds to poach out the core.
Do they still count as a startup if they're ~5 years old and have >5m users? I switched from Evernote to Springpad back in 2010 after Evernote rewrote their desktop app between versions 2.2 and 3.0 and dropped Linux support (using it via Wine was horrendous). Evernote 3.0 basically because a desktop presentation of the .Net web app, which was not great, and Springpad's web clipper at the time was mnuch better. That said, Springpad just didn't really have any killer features and Evernote had a lot more traction and a hugely better marketing initiative. I am not a fan of Evernote, and never became particularly enamored with Springpad, either. If the Springpad engineers join the Google Keep team, though, I'd be really happy. Keep just totally sucks right now. :)
That's a fascinating take on things I didn't really internalize. In the Boston community (which I'm a part of) it's being treated more like a "we couldn't raise the B, so we needed to shut things down and admit defeat."
That being said, a core team poach would definitely have killed the team, as well.
Consumer plays are hard in general, but particularly difficult in Beantown.
I guess it's all about the order of events. _If_ the poaching happened first, then the investors found out that core-talent got poached they might hesitate to invest.
Catch Notes had around the same number of users when we "decided to go in a different direction" last summer.
It was incredibly challenging for us to monetize the service and our user numbers where an order of magnitude off of where things would have been intesting for some investors.
I think their big issue was that they couldn't get to "we're the best at X" - there was no use case where they were top dog. They tried to find it - recipes, etc - but they just couldn't get out of Evernote's shadow. I wasn't surprised when they announced they were shutting down - they were pretty clearly thrashing around, trying to figure it out.
I'm a longtime Evernote Premium user and for I while I ran Springpad simultaneously, saving my notes both in Evernote and Springpad. I really liked the Springpad interface, but in the end I decided to stick with Evernote. The main reason? Springpad was free, with no paid plans.
I don't really like free services for important stuff like my personal of professional notes. I want to be sure I'm dealing with a reliable service, with revenue to cover the bills, with a real chance to stick around. It's hard to trust a free service.
Ironic. I switched from Evernote to Springpad a year or so ago, because Evernote was so awful. No great loss though. I never really found much use for either service.
