Ink
The business, the turning points, and the decisions behind them.
01 / WHAT IT BUILT
What the company did
Ink was the 2013–2015 brand of the developer tools company founded as Filepicker.io. It offered a file management platform for developers, letting web and mobile applications connect to cloud sources such as Dropbox, Google Drive, Facebook and Instagram, plus device storage, to upload, process and serve files. Under the Ink name the Y Combinator-backed company raised a $1.8 million seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz and Highland Capital, and counted 20,000 applications from 17,000 developers as users. In 2015 the company retired the Ink brand and rebranded as Filestack.
02 / Ink FAILURE REASONS
Failure reasons
No independent failure postmortem exists for the Ink brand, because the underlying business did not collapse: it was renamed. The Ink name lasted roughly two years before the company rebranded to Filestack in 2015, retiring the Ink product branding. The original founding team had already departed in 2014, and the rebrand marked a strategic repositioning of the same file-upload business, which continued operating under the Filestack name.
03 / EVENT HISTORY
Events in the structured record
- Product or service closed
Andrew Askins states Krit launched freelancer contract tool Ink on Product Hunt in April 2015 and shut it down in October 2015 after burnout before the business model worked, pivoting to consulting. Starter Story corroborates same shutdown decision.
04 / CONTEMPORARY REBUILD ASSESSMENT
Difficulty of rebuilding this project today
Material for this section is being gathered and checked. It will appear here once ready.
Overall assessment: Not completed
05 / CAUSAL CHAIN
How the factors connect
- 01
The company raised a $1.8 million seed round in 2013 under the Ink brand, led by Andreessen Horowitz and Highland Capital.
- 02
The original founding team left the company in 2014.
- 03
In 2015 the Ink brand was retired and the business rebranded as Filestack; no separate liquidation of the Ink-branded product was disclosed because the business continued under the new name.