ThinkUp
The business, the turning points, and the decisions behind them.
01 / WHAT IT BUILT
What the company did
ThinkUp was a social media analytics service co-founded by Gina Trapani and Anil Dash. It analyzed a users Twitter, Instagram and Facebook activity and delivered fun, plain-English insights about their network, by email or in an app stream. It began in 2009 as a grant-funded open-source project inside the nonprofit Expert Labs, then relaunched in 2012 as a venture-backed subscription company charging $5 per month.
02 / ThinkUp FAILURE REASONS
Failure reasons
ThinkUp depended entirely on data from Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, and those platforms steadily locked their APIs down: Facebook cut key fields in April 2015, Instagram tightened access in June 2016, and Twitter announced further changes for that fall. It became technically impossible to keep gathering the data the product needed. From a business standpoint there were not enough subscribers to cover the cost of the massive redevelopment the new APIs would require, so the company wound down in 2016 and refunded members.
03 / EVENT HISTORY
Events in the structured record
- Company founded
Gina Trapani begins ThinkUp as an open-source project inside Expert Labs, the nonprofit tech incubator.
- Product launch
ThinkUp relaunches as a for-profit subscription company selling social-media insights for $5 per month.
- Operations ended
With social network APIs increasingly restricted, ThinkUp shuts down its hosted service in June 2016 and refunds subscribers.
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
Insights app for your social media activity
- 02
Fully dependent on platform APIs
- 03
Facebook/Instagram/Twitter locked APIs down
- 04
Too few subscribers to rebuild; shut down 2016