I was using their product, I paid for their product and they shut it down without notice ? Classy move !
Cue is Shutting Down
51–60 of 69 posts
Re: Cue is Shutting Down
#52It'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. Loo…
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.
Re: Cue is Shutting Down
#53Their initial product was impressive and useful. Hope we get more information about what went wrong, and that the team lands somewhere good.
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!
here you go. https://github.com/Cue
Re: Cue is Shutting Down
#54Why can't they open source their code?
I'm curious. did they say they can't?
Re: Cue is Shutting Down
#55There were Cue job postings here on HN close to a month ago. :/
And these were really attractive.
Re: Cue is Shutting Down
#56Re: Cue is Shutting Down
#57Formerly Greplin. For those that don't know what it/they did: http://www.crunchbase.com/company/cue http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/30/technology/apps-that-know-... (July 2013)
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?"
Re: Cue is Shutting Down
#58I find it weird that this company would be shutting down just as everyone is raving about Shel and Roberts book: Age Of Context. I might reach out to the guys at cue and see what they noticed that is leading them to shutdown/pivot to a new business.
Re: Cue is Shutting Down
#59Cue (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.
Re: Cue is Shutting Down
#60I used Greplin quite a few times to find where I had heard something or seen a link. It was useful in that respect. But not useful enough to pay for. I never saw much of a monetization model going for them.