Learning from Failure – Building Sustainability

Springpad was an organizer for all kinds of projects and tasks such as home improvements, interior design projects, movies to watch and so on. It closed it’s doors in mid 2015. The startup had over 5 million users and a product which users loved. The main reason for it’s closure was the inability of the startup to create a sustainable business model within time.

"We built a heck of a product," Springpad cofounder Jeff Janer says. "But we didn’t build the business. In that respect, given our background, we wanted to provide useful information to people that could be monetized. That meant considering micro-transactions. We were considering organizing guru Peter Walsh’s Instant Kitchen Organizer as a free example for a series of different room organizers that we would launch as paid notebooks for purchase, or generating income from affiliate conversions, but we never rolled out a premium or freemium offering based on notebooks or anything like that. We had to make the choice of going for ad support or a freemium model. We went down the ad support path, which just required a lot more scale than we could ever achieve." (excerpt taken from this link)

Advice – Look at building a model which is not just scalable but also sustainable in the longer term.