It's sad, I remember greplin had a lot of things going for them.
In general re: shutdowns:
If the economics aren't red ink or a white elephant, why not find a buyer or merge with a frenemy instead of throwing away value and customers?
Most shutdowns appear to me like putting 30 packs of $100 bills on a table, pouring gasoline over them and throwing a lit match while rationalizing "Everybody does it, so it's okay. Look at 'em go!"
For apps, building things that cost basically nothing[0] to run and letting them have sufficient time to grow on their own. Rinse. Lather. Repeat faster.
[0] auto-scaling & revenue covering costs.
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"A wise man will make more opportunities than he finds." - Sir F. Bacon
Maybe the product never fulfilled the promise of being "the other half of web search" (from a TechCrunch mention 3 years ago) and they realised it was never going to. Maybe they found that investors and potential buyers agreed. Maybe, more importantly, they found that customers agreed - we have no idea what their revenue numbers were. Maybe they found a buyer that would take over the project for a small sum, but required the founders/key staff to sign long employment contracts - which, in the face of the above realisation is a pretty unattractive prospect.
Recalling that the product had something going for it, a while ago, pre-pivot, and obviously not enough to make you a customer, is a rather weak foundation of the assertion that it's worth a non-trivial sum.
Keeping the thing running isn't free - there will always be something to attend to, if nothing else, applying security patches to the stack (which requires testing which takes time and effort). If you expect to run with paying customers, there will always be a minimum of customer service required when payments fail or there are chargebacks or whatever. All that for the benefit of not throwing "something" away? FWIW, 30 stacks of $100 bills is $300k - or about two cheap engineer-year salaries including overhead.
In general re: shutdowns:
If the economics aren't red ink or a white elephant, why not find a buyer or merge with a frenemy instead of throwing away value and customers?
Most shutdowns appear to me like putting 30 packs of $100 bills on a table, pouring gasoline over them and throwing a lit match while rationalizing "Everybody does it, so it's okay. Look at 'em go!"
For apps, building things that cost basically nothing[0] to run and letting them have sufficient time to grow on their own. Rinse. Lather. Repeat faster.
[0] auto-scaling & revenue covering costs.
--
"A wise man will make more opportunities than he finds." - Sir F. Bacon