Notifo
The business, the turning points, and the decisions behind them.
01 / WHAT IT BUILT
What the company did
Notifo (YC Winter 2010) was a simple mobile notifications platform for anything. Founded by Chad Etzel in San Francisco, it piped real-time notifications from anywhere -- Twitter, Hacker News, GitHub, Facebook, or any Growl-compatible app on your computer -- to your iPhone, at a time when most of those services had no apps of their own. It later added a free user-to-user chat feature on its servers. The service shut down in September 2011 after failing to find a userbase.
02 / Notifo FAILURE REASONS
Failure reasons
Notifo did not build a sufficient user base. As the services it supported introduced their own mobile applications and notifications, a separate notification platform became less necessary.
03 / EVENT HISTORY
Events in the structured record
- Operations ended
Mobile-notification company Notifo announced that it was shutting down in September 2011.
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
On September 8, 2011, Notifo announced it was shutting down; the service would stay functional only until the server money ran dry, with no further development.
- 02
Founder Chad Etzel moved on to another job (later Twilio), while co-founder Paul Stamatiou moved on to PicPlum.