5 lessons from Greplin’s demise

When I first of Greplin via a flurry of news from elite tech blogs, I fell in love.

Finally, a way to search all my stuff - Gmail, Google Docs, even Facebook in one single search - brilliant!  And they were by Sequoia, generally a good sign.

The first weeks I used the service a lot but over time, less and less.

Why?

I found I didn’t need to use it that often, and when I did, I didn’t.

The handful of times I remembered to use Greplin though it worked pretty well.

In most cases though local and a search in one of the web services did the job. And in the rarer cases that didn’t work by habit I would go through them one by one until I found what I was looking for.

So in the end, something I thought would be a hit turned out the opposite.

What startup lessons am I taking away from Greplin’s ?

1. Be a painkiller, not a vitamin (eg dropbox)
2. Make something that people are going to use often (eg evernote)
3. Hype is different from traction (eg greplin vs whatsapp)
4. Give people a trigger to return to the service (eg icons, notifications)
5. Make something viral or at least monetizing well enough to buy traffic (eg mint)

Goodbye Greplin, and wishing  the best…

What lessons would you draw from this?   me or