GreenGar Studios
The business, the turning points, and the decisions behind them.
01 / WHAT IT BUILT
What the company did
GreenGar Studios was a mobile app studio founded in Ho Chi Minh City in 2010 by Vietnamese entrepreneur Truong Thanh Thuy (Thuy Truong) and fellow USC alumnus Elliot Lee. Its flagship product, Whiteboard: Collaborative Drawing, was a real-time collaborative whiteboard app that reached #1 in the Productivity category on the iOS App Store in the U.S. and other countries, with 8-12 million downloads. The studio also made apps like Brain Tuner and Color ID Free.
02 / GreenGar Studios FAILURE REASONS
Failure factors
First-party Medium post (13 Jun 2014, opened) by last CEO Thuy Muoi: despite downloads/revenue/accelerator traction, GreenGar 'failed in creating a scalable business' and ended the GreenGar chapter without further app development/support.
Founder stated the company failed to create a scalable business despite product traction and revenue.
03 / EVENT HISTORY
Events in the structured record
- Operations ended
last CEO Thuy Muoi announced end of the GreenGar chapter—apps left live but with no further development or support—closing the studio as an operating business.
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
GreenGar Studios was founded in Ho Chi Minh City in 2010 by Truong Thanh Thuy and Elliot Lee as a mobile app studio.
- 02
Its flagship app Whiteboard: Collaborative Drawing reached #1 in the Productivity category on the iOS App Store in the U.S. and other countries, with 8-12 million downloads.
- 03
In June 2013 GreenGar joined 500 Startups' sixth batch, the first Vietnam-based company in the accelerator.
- 04
In 2014 GreenGar shut down, having failed to scale up the business; the team spun off to create Tappy, which was acquihired by Weeby.co in May 2015.