Wunderkit

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

~ the last words ~

6Wunderkinder was a Berlin company that existed because Christian Reber had posted on XING in 2009 looking for someone to build a to-do app with, and Frank Thelen answered. Wunderlist came out of that on 9 November 2010 and was an immediate hit: free and cross-platform when neither was normal for a task list. Two years later the company had the problem every one-product startup gets handed, which is that a to-do list is a feature and investors want a platform.

Wunderkit was the platform. It shipped in February 2012 as an invitation-only beta and it was much larger in ambition than the thing it came from: workspaces you created for a piece of work, other people you pulled into them, notes and tasks attached to the workspace rather than to you. It was aimed at individuals and at businesses at the same time, and the pitch was that your family holiday and your company's product roadmap could live in the same tool.

It never came out of that beta. Seven months is not long enough for a product to leave a mark on anyone outside the people who chased an invite code, which is why Wunderkit has almost no afterlife on the web. The clearest record it left is the blog post that closed it.

~ the record ~

~ four hundred thousand signups ~

By September 2012 the beta had taken 400,000 registrations. For a private beta from a company with one prior product, that is a real number, and it is worth sitting with, because 400,000 was not enough. The company's own account was that signups and engagement had both come in under what was needed, and that the thing had gotten complicated: they had found bugs and scaling problems and had, in their words, become "frustrated with our own product".

The judgment underneath that is the interesting one. They concluded that Wunderkit had become too complex for its users, and that Wunderlist was already accomplishing the same goals with fewer moving parts.

~ the choice ~

On 6 September 2012 the company published both halves of the decision on the same day: Wunderkit would receive no more updates, and a completely redesigned Wunderlist 2 was coming. The sentence that carried it was blunt for a startup blog. It became increasingly clear that we could no longer focus on both products, they wrote, and they needed to say goodbye to one or risk both.

The Internet Archive shows wunderkit.com serving a real page at the start of 2012 and answering with a redirect by 1 October, so the domain was pointed at Wunderlist within a month of the announcement. Wunderlist 2 arrived in December.

~ the survivor ~

Killing Wunderkit worked, on the terms it was done. Wunderlist got a redesign, then a Sequoia round in November 2013 that was the fund's first investment in Germany, then Microsoft in 2015. The company that had to pick one product picked correctly and got an exit out of it, and the story of what Microsoft then did with the survivor is written on its own stone. Reber went on to build Pitch in the same city.

Very few products get to be killed for a good reason by people who were right. This is one.

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