Swipes
The business, the turning points, and the decisions behind them.
01 / WHAT IT BUILT
What the company did
Swipes was a Danish task management app founded in 2013 by CEO Kasper Pihl Tornoe (with co-founders including Kasper Grubbe). It connected to Evernote and turned scattered to-dos - check boxes buried in notes - into a clean daily planning timeline, with a strong emphasis on planning the work day and week. It was publicly voted a top-3 startup built on the Evernote platform and presented at Evernote's EC4 conference. The app is defunct; no public post-mortem was ever published.
02 / Swipes FAILURE REASONS
Failure reasons
No public account of why Swipes ended was ever published. What is on record is that a five-year-old indie task app - critically acclaimed in the productivity press and loved by Evernote power users - quietly disappeared around 2018. The familiar indie-app trap applies: building on someone else's platform (Evernote), a crowded to-do market with free giants, and $500K of funding that can only buy so many years of runway. But without a founder statement, that remains informed reading, not fact.
03 / EVENT HISTORY
Events in the structured record
- Company founded
Swipes was founded in Denmark by Kasper Pihl Tornoe and team as a task management app built on Evernote.
- Evernote recognition
Swipes was publicly voted a top-3 startup built on the Evernote platform and presented at the EC4 Evernote conference.
- App defunct
The Swipes app ceased operating around 2018; no public shutdown announcement or post-mortem was published.
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 Swipes app ceased operating around 2018, about five years after its 2013 launch.
- 02
No bankruptcy filing, debts, creditor claims, or founder post-mortem were ever disclosed.
- 03
The company had raised $500,000; what happened to the remaining capital is not public.