Thanks, there are so many startups, that I can't keep track of all of them. Once they die, it's like "we're dead" and I'm thinking "...Well what did you do in the first place again?"
PPS. Sad to see Greplin go, loved the service but was too afraid to give access to my data at all times, so ended up building our federated search which doesn't require that. Would be very interested to know more about what happened.
Did you watch the screencast to the end? i ran a search and got personalized results from all my web apps like Gmail and AngelList. How is this not like Greplin?
I know you're just trying to promote your company, but it feels a little like handing out business cards at a funeral. Sure, you can do it, but it seems little tacky. This post is still in the mourning phase. It will probably move on to the post-mortem, what is a replacement for it phase tomorrow or Friday.
Yes, I do promote my startup whenever I can, but am always on topic. Why the negativity? Is it wrong to be vocal or do you feel like I'm dancing on Greplin's grave?
Your post comes across (to me) as self-serving and somewhat socially awkward. The "PS" and "PPS", in particular, are quite crass and not the way to promote a company. You seem like someone who meets me at a keg party and jumps right into a pitch as soon as I tell you my name.
No offense; I just prefer HN comments to be less blatantly promotional.
I can't reply to Chris' comment for some reason, so posting the reply here:
I'm sorry that I came across as crass and socially awkward - I hope I can prove to you that I'm not so bad in person one day.
The PS and PPS are edits because I got excited about what this meant for us and realized I was being too self promotional esp. to people that knew nothing about us, so thought I'd give some background and clarify my feelings.
Freemium. You could get basic functionality for free, but certain tasks would cost money. I seem to remember thinking that the balance between what was free and what was paid was a bit off.
I see now. So they were trying to go off of in app purchases? That's not a bad way to do it. I think the problem is monetizing a service like that WITH competitors like google now is just a hard problem in general. I could see where it would be a good idea if they had some good lockin. It was definitely worth an attempt.
Was sad to see what happened to Cue. It's another example of a great idea with terrible timing. How do you compete when the biggest players in the game join the race?
Cheers guys, there was obvious talent on your team! Interested to see what comes next...
Sad to hear, as I had discovered them recently and was interested in the problems they were tackling. I guess this isn't a complete surprise, with their Twitter account looking inactive as of late.
Wow, not such a sad ending after all. It looks like they got acquired by Apple for between $40 million and $60 million; no wonder their shut down message on their website didn't state that they ran out of money or something. http://techcrunch.com/2013/10/03/cue-acquired-for-over-40m-l...
Much sadness. Greplin was an amazing idea, but the execution was a little off for them to reach mass adoption (although I think it was ideal for a niche group of people). I think they tried to change that with their pivot to Cue, but obviously it was not successful.
I'll certainly remember their programming adventure challenge fondly. I hope they at least open source that, if they can't open source other parts of their software for whatever reason.
Agree, would love to see a post-mortem blog post. I would also be interesting in finding out what they will do with the technology they created, it would be great if they open sourced it!
I thought that as well when I first read what they posted. Of course even with the NSA revelations I would have expected them to delete the data right away so maybe I am just reading too much into it.
I'd be very interested in learning why Cue is calling it quits -- I really loved the concept behind their service. Has anyone managed to find their contact information?
Cue (shutdown), Don.na (pivoted), Tempo, Sunrise, Google Now, others.
Fascinating space with a lot of competition. But has any of these products gotten close to a revenue model?
Throw in some of the mail clients and other apps like Sparrow, Mailbox, and Fantastical and from the outside, it seems more like acqui-hires to absorb the product and team into a bigger company is the way to go.
Interested to know what you think about them shutting down then. Seems like they were quite far along... Any insight on what changed their mind or what you will do differently?
It's sad, I remember greplin had a lot of things going for them.
In general re: shutdowns:
If the economics aren't red ink or a white elephant, why not find a buyer or merge with a frenemy instead of throwing away value and customers?
Most shutdowns appear to me like putting 30 packs of $100 bills on a table, pouring gasoline over them and throwing a lit match while rationalizing "Everybody does it, so it's okay. Look at 'em go!"
For apps, building things that cost basically nothing[0] to run and letting them have sufficient time to grow on their own. Rinse. Lather. Repeat faster.
[0] auto-scaling & revenue covering costs.
--
"A wise man will make more opportunities than he finds." - Sir F. Bacon
Maybe the product never fulfilled the promise of being "the other half of web search" (from a TechCrunch mention 3 years ago) and they realised it was never going to. Maybe they found that investors and potential buyers agreed. Maybe, more importantly, they found that customers agreed - we have no idea what their revenue numbers were. Maybe they found a buyer that would take over the project for a small sum, but required the founders/key staff to sign long employment contracts - which, in the face of the above realisation is a pretty unattractive prospect.
Recalling that the product had something going for it, a while ago, pre-pivot, and obviously not enough to make you a customer, is a rather weak foundation of the assertion that it's worth a non-trivial sum.
Keeping the thing running isn't free - there will always be something to attend to, if nothing else, applying security patches to the stack (which requires testing which takes time and effort). If you expect to run with paying customers, there will always be a minimum of customer service required when payments fail or there are chargebacks or whatever. All that for the benefit of not throwing "something" away? FWIW, 30 stacks of $100 bills is $300k - or about two cheap engineer-year salaries including overhead.
TechCrunch posted this update: We are hearing from additional sources that they did raise that extra funding, so this is looking like a product pivot or a sale rather than a full shutdown of the company.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 134 ms ] threadhttp://www.crunchbase.com/company/cue
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/30/technology/apps-that-know-... (July 2013)
And a promising TC article earlier this year: http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/02/too-much-email-please-stop-...
Here's a screencast - search is towards the end: https://www.dropbox.com/s/04rrwxuuvkzpyrp/starthq.mp4
You can sign up here: https://starthq.com
Please use the Feedback form to let us know which services you'd like us to support and we will prioritize them for launch.
PS. For a bit of background on us, here's a blog post that was on the front page of HN on Monday http://www.arcticstartup.com/2013/09/30/starthq-capitalizes-...
PPS. Sad to see Greplin go, loved the service but was too afraid to give access to my data at all times, so ended up building our federated search which doesn't require that. Would be very interested to know more about what happened.
I'm sorry. Next time I'll refrain from posting comments when I've only had two hours of sleep the night before.
No offense; I just prefer HN comments to be less blatantly promotional.
I'm sorry that I came across as crass and socially awkward - I hope I can prove to you that I'm not so bad in person one day.
The PS and PPS are edits because I got excited about what this meant for us and realized I was being too self promotional esp. to people that knew nothing about us, so thought I'd give some background and clarify my feelings.
PS. No offence taken :)
Cheers guys, there was obvious talent on your team! Interested to see what comes next...
They were in my top 5 favorite startups. Were they killed by Siri and Google Now?
Until I read the message on their homepage, I never realized they had a premium service!
I'll certainly remember their programming adventure challenge fondly. I hope they at least open source that, if they can't open source other parts of their software for whatever reason.
In general re: shutdowns:
If the economics aren't red ink or a white elephant, why not find a buyer or merge with a frenemy instead of throwing away value and customers?
Most shutdowns appear to me like putting 30 packs of $100 bills on a table, pouring gasoline over them and throwing a lit match while rationalizing "Everybody does it, so it's okay. Look at 'em go!"
For apps, building things that cost basically nothing[0] to run and letting them have sufficient time to grow on their own. Rinse. Lather. Repeat faster.
[0] auto-scaling & revenue covering costs.
--
"A wise man will make more opportunities than he finds." - Sir F. Bacon
Recalling that the product had something going for it, a while ago, pre-pivot, and obviously not enough to make you a customer, is a rather weak foundation of the assertion that it's worth a non-trivial sum.
Keeping the thing running isn't free - there will always be something to attend to, if nothing else, applying security patches to the stack (which requires testing which takes time and effort). If you expect to run with paying customers, there will always be a minimum of customer service required when payments fail or there are chargebacks or whatever. All that for the benefit of not throwing "something" away? FWIW, 30 stacks of $100 bills is $300k - or about two cheap engineer-year salaries including overhead.
The team is likely working on a new product.
Source: http://techcrunch.com/2013/10/02/cue-greplin/