Flud

» see flud.it as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

In August 2010 the iPad was four months old, nobody knew what a tablet was for, and a small team in the Spreckels Theater Building in San Diego shipped a news reader that answered the question with pictures. Flud was built on the idea that reading the news was a social act: you followed people rather than feeds, and a story you liked went out to your own followers with one gesture. The iPhone version arrived that December and the thing took off hard enough that the founders later described it as adding a new user every four seconds.

The press was extraordinary for a company this size. Fast Company named the iPad interface the best UI design of 2010. NBC called it the future of news. $2.1 million in seed money came in from Detroit Venture Partners and Ludlow Ventures, with Behance's Scott Belsky among the backers, and the plan was to convert that attention into a round of $8 million.

That round never closed. Investors wanted three to six months of retention data and Flud had two, because the growth had been so fast and so recent that the numbers did not exist yet. In December 2012 the company pivoted to an enterprise product, a version of the reader that companies could use to circulate what their own people were reading. Fifteen hundred companies signed up for the wait list and the remaining four-person team booked around $500,000 in four months, which was a real business arriving about one funding round too late. Flud shut down on 8 August 2013.

I was not an early tablet buyer. In 2010 an iPad in Turkey meant paying an import premium on a device whose purpose was still an open argument, so a news reader that launched tablet-first was a thing I read about on a laptop. By the time Flud reached a phone I actually owned, its Android build was competing with Google Reader clients that cost nothing and did not need friends.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the breakout ~

Flud shipped on four platforms in three years, which for a seed-stage team was close to reckless. iPad, iPhone, Android and Windows Phone all got real builds. The Windows Phone one mattered more than it sounds: Microsoft was paying attention to anybody willing to ship there, and a tiny San Diego startup with a design award was exactly the kind of name a platform likes to list.

What it was actually selling was taste. An RSS reader is a pipe; Flud was trying to be the room the pipe empties into, where who you followed determined what arrived. That bet turned out to be correct and the companies that won it were Twitter and Facebook, which already had everyone's friends.

~ the decline ~

Bobby Ghoshal's own account of the failure is unusually plain for a founder postmortem. The product went out underbaked and the press coverage arrived before the servers were ready, so the first wave of users hit crashes and left one-star reviews on the way out. Recovering a consumer app from a bad launch review is close to impossible, because the next user reads the reviews before they read the app.

~ the postmortem ~

The enterprise pivot is the part worth keeping. A four-person team with no sales organization generated half a million dollars in bookings in four months by selling a consumer reader to companies, and that number is better than most of what the consumer version ever produced. Ghoshal's verdict was that running an enterprise company is a different job from running a consumer one, and that his team discovered this while already out of runway. The founders went looking for a buyer for the assets. No sale was ever announced, and the apps came down in August 2013.

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