
Springpad is shutting down - orjan
https://springpad.com/about
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pccampbell
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"?

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VLM
[https://springpad.com/blog/2014/05/springpad-says-
goodbye/](https://springpad.com/blog/2014/05/springpad-says-goodbye/)

"As part of closing our business, a portion of our team is joining Google."

So those are the facts. My probably inaccurate opinion is an acqui-hire gone
somewhat off the rails.

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pccampbell
Looks less like it though, as there's definitely a postmortem being given
about the ebb and flow of freemium/revenue models:
[http://www.xconomy.com/boston/2014/05/28/five-lessons-for-
co...](http://www.xconomy.com/boston/2014/05/28/five-lessons-for-consumer-
tech-startups-in-springpad-shutdown/)

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?

Obviously not that simple, but curious.

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smtddr
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.

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pccampbell
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.

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smtddr
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.

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inthewoods
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.

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yabatopia
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.

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izacus
Ugh, sorry to see them go, their idea of how notes app should look like pretty
much complemented my workflow.

Having migrated everything to Evernote... it just reminded me just how
atrocious their web and Android apps are UX wise.

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tr4656
I'd agree about the web client but what's atrocious about the Android app?

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shyn3
Good for having the export/migrate option.

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mcintyre1994
Especially to Evernote, that's really helpful.

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webhat
Will they open source it?

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xxxmadraxxx
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.

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mayel
I always preferred Springpad's UX and way of structuring data over Evernote's.
Not sure why everyone is obessed with the later.

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andy_ppp
Marketing... Springpad for me is much better. Maybe we can recreate it with
The Drogulous as a backend?

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dsjoerg
what was springpad

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yen223
IMO a superior version of Evernote.

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inmyunix
and no one was surprised

