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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 ?
- Be a painkiller, not a vitamin (eg dropbox)
- Make something that people are going to use often (eg evernote)
- Hype is different from traction (eg greplin vs whatsapp)
- Give people a trigger to return to the service (eg icons, notifications)
- 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