LayerVault
The business, the turning points, and the decisions behind them.
01 / WHAT IT BUILT
What the company did
LayerVault was a version-control service for designers, founded in 2011 by Kelly Sutton. Often described as GitHub for designers, it let design teams track versions of design files, and the company also ran Designer News, a popular online community for designers.
02 / LayerVault FAILURE REASONS
Failure reasons
The company never made the product financially viable. As CEO Kelly Sutton put it at the shutdown announcement, LayerVault failed to make the service financially viable, exhausted its existing capital reserves, and could not secure additional capital, so it ran out of money. The market also shifted under it: Dropbox's acquisition of competitor Pixelapse in early 2015 failed to reassure investors that the design-versioning space would pay off.
03 / EVENT HISTORY
Events in the structured record
- Founded
LayerVault started in 2011 as a version-control service for designers, backed by investors including Betaworks, High Line Venture Partners and SV Angel.
- GitHub integration
Announced an integration with GitHub; customers included AOL, BBC, Expedia, Pebble, Shopify, Spotify and Adobe.
- Shutdown
On March 11, 2015 the company announced it would shut down on April 11, 2015; customers had until then to download their files. Designer News continued to operate.
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
Announced on March 11, 2015 that the service would shut down on April 11, 2015.
- 02
Web interface went offline and the Mac app stopped working on April 11, 2015.
- 03
Designer News, its designer community site, continued to operate.
- 04
No public loss or restructuring figures were disclosed.