When to kill your tech startup – Lessons learned from HelloInbox

Well that was my first startup. Just sent out the official announcement that HelloInbox is closing down. Two years of hard work, blood sweat and tears.

So what were the reasons that I closed down HelloInbox?

1. no large increase in users. As a startup in the B2C space you need 15-25 % growth per month, HelloInbox did not have that.
2. little willingness to pay for a premium version. We surveyed our users to see if we added premium features they were willing to pay a subscription fee. Only a few users said yes. In combination with considerate costs per user that would have made it impossible to get to profitability.
3. there is competition, but they are also having a hard time. Orgoo is dead. Threadsy is the only company that got a considerable investment. Fuser is still around, but seems to be hanging by a thread. Zenbe and Silentale have pivoted away. So probably demand but no money to be made.
4. feedback from mentors in the Founder Institute:
   1. pain point is not big enough
   2. I try to change customer behavior as everybody has already their preferred mail tools, which is very hard
   3. B2C successes are sexy (Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin) but very binary: big success (a few) or a complete failure (the other 99.990 sites out there). Very hard to get users to pay, so you need advertising which means getting up to a million active before you start make money. And average revenue per user will remain low.

So yeah, kill

And on to the next adventure of course. Still in the mobile space, that will grow with 1,000 percent to a $100 billion market the next 4 years. Not B2C but B2B: Mobtest, mobile app testing. No more one star ratings for apps but an easy an efficient way to do testing so developers know for sure their app is great and users will love it. Exciting times! Of course I will be running this show from Silicon Valley here, not going back to Amsterdam for a while:). I expect the first tests in q4 so stay tuned.

Small update: CNet has also found out that Threadsy has stopped working on their product and that the universal inbox is a dead space. All players have left this space.