Springpad
The business, the turning points, and the decisions behind them.
01 / WHAT IT BUILT
What the company did
Springpad was a Boston-area note-taking and information-capturing service founded in 2008 by Jeff Janer and team. It let users capture notes, tasks, and lists from a website or smartphone app into a personal database called 'My Stuff', automatically categorizing saved items by type - recipes, movies, products, restaurants, wine - and enriching them with relevant news, links, and deals. Offered free to members, it positioned itself as a more visual alternative to Evernote and counted over 400,000 active users, with Fast Company reporting more than 5 million users in total. It shut down on June 25, 2014.
02 / Springpad FAILURE REASONS
Failure reasons
Springpad never figured out how to make money. The service was free, and while the team considered monetization routes - paid organizer notebooks with Peter Walsh, affiliate conversions from purchase-oriented clipping, micro-transactions - it never rolled out a premium or freemium offering. Instead it went down the ad-supported path, which required far more scale than it could ever achieve, and after six years of battling Evernote it could not attract a rival user base even after a Pinterest-inspired redesign. Unable to secure additional funding or scale to a self-sustaining business, it shut down.
03 / EVENT HISTORY
Events in the structured record
- Service launched
Springpad launched as a free information-capturing service, ahead of the mobile app economy and years before Pinterest did similar things.
- Redesign
The service underwent a Pinterest-inspired redesign in a bid to attract users, but could not build a base to rival Evernote.
- Shutdown announced and completed
On May 23, 2014 Springpad announced it would cease operations on June 25, 2014, citing failure to secure additional funding or become self-sustaining; users could export data or migrate to Evernote. A portion of the team joined Google.
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 May 23, 2014 Springpad announced it would cease operations; the site and apps went offline on June 25, 2014.
- 02
Users were given an export tool (JSON, read-only HTML) and automatic migration to Evernote; all user data on Springpad's servers was deleted after the shutdown date.
- 03
A portion of the team joined Google; no acquisition, debt, or creditor claims were publicly disclosed.