Springpad

» see springpad.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

the first time i heard of springpad was after it died. fast company ran a piece in 2014 with a headline shaped like a tombstone: "this startup had over 5 million users and a great product. then it folded." that was springpad in one line. it had built a smart in-browser clipping tool that did half of what pinterest later built, two years earlier, and then it ran out of money and patience at almost exactly the moment pinterest figured out how to make a billion-dollar business out of the same idea.

jeff janer and jeff chow launched the public version of springpad on november 12, 2008 out of boston as a product of spring partners. the app was a notebook crossed with a kind of structured-data parser. you saved a link or a photo, and the app guessed what kind of thing you had saved (a recipe, say, or a product to buy) before pulling the right metadata for that category. then it laid the result out as a card with the relevant fields filled in. there were browser extensions and mobile apps on every platform, all syncing through one account. for 2010 this was a nice piece of engineering.

the timing was the killer. springpad was a year ahead of pinterest on the visual-pinboard idea and four years behind evernote on the note-taking idea, which left it with no obvious mental category to be the category leader of. the business model was lead generation, which is to say the app would surface affiliate links and offers when it recognized you had saved something purchasable. that revenue stream never grew fast enough. on may 23, 2014 the company announced shutdown, with a june 25 deadline and an automated evernote migration tool. about 4.5 million accounts moved or were abandoned. google had quietly acqui-hired jeff chow and four engineers a few weeks before the announcement, and that was the end.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the pinterest ghost ~

springpad and pinterest had almost the same product theory. people collect things they want to come back to, like meals and travel ideas and products to buy, and a soft place to stash these into useful boards is genuinely a product. pinterest landed on a visual front-end and an addictive infinite-scroll discovery loop, and that was the difference. springpad was more of a tool and pinterest was more of a habit. when pinterest hit unicorn valuation in 2011, springpad's investors were already starting to wonder when their version would catch.

~ the actual end ~

the founders gave a clean exit. users got two months of notice with json and html exports, plus an automated evernote-import path. the founders posted a public farewell rather than the usual silent shutdown notice. they did not pretend the company was being acquired strategically. they said outright that they had run out of runway and could not see a path to revenue at the scale needed to keep going. that level of clarity is unusual. most pre-pinterest content apps that died in 2013-2014 just turned the lights off.

~ the funny part ~

jeff chow's google role after the acqui-hire was on google now and later google assistant. the structured-data parsing he had built into springpad, the part that recognized a recipe and pulled out cooking time and ingredients, is the same kind of work google later wanted in its assistant stack. so the smartest thing in springpad did not actually die. it just changed buildings and stopped showing up under that name.

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