Cue is Shutting Down | Hacker News Reader

Cue is Shutting Down

cueup.com

105 pointschristangrant67 comments

Formerly Greplin. For those that don't know what it/they did:

http://www.crunchbase.com/company/cue

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/30/technology/apps-that-know-... (July 2013)

Thanks for this - I has no idea it was the same team. It's a shame, but that smart of a team is probably doing it for the right reasons.

They had tons of Hacker News front pages too: https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/submissions&q=grepli...

And a promising TC article earlier this year: http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/02/too-much-email-please-stop-...

Thanks, there are so many startups, that I can't keep track of all of them. Once they die, it's like "we're dead" and I'm thinking "...Well what did you do in the first place again?"

There were Cue job postings here on HN close to a month ago. :/

And these were really attractive.

I applied to one... their Jam Room looked amazing.

So they've actually been acquired. I guess they didn't just look amazing.

TechCrunch posted this update: We are hearing from additional sources that they did raise that extra funding, so this is looking like a product pivot or a sale rather than a full shutdown of the company.

Source: http://techcrunch.com/2013/10/02/cue-greplin/

Their initial product was impressive and useful. Hope we get more information about what went wrong, and that the team lands somewhere good.

Agree, would love to see a post-mortem blog post. I would also be interesting in finding out what they will do with the technology they created, it would be great if they open sourced it!

here you go. https://github.com/Cue

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.

"A wise man will make more opportunities than he finds." - Sir F. Bacon

A man called Sir Bacon, if we can't follow him, who can we follow?

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.

Then again, it has been reported that Apple bought them.

Yup: http://techcrunch.com/2013/10/03/cue-acquired-for-over-40m-l...

Much sadness. Greplin was an amazing idea, but the execution was a little off for them to reach mass adoption (although I think it was ideal for a niche group of people). I think they tried to change that with their pivot to Cue, but obviously it was not successful.

I'll certainly remember their programming adventure challenge fondly. I hope they at least open source that, if they can't open source other parts of their software for whatever reason.

Is this the company that had that cool terminal adventure programming challenge?

Yes they were, and yes it was cool. Seems to be down now though -- part of the rather sudden Cue-shaped hole in the Internet.

Wow, I really thought their initial value proposition (originally as Greplin) was of great utility.

Yeah, I was kicking myself for not have thought of it when I first heard of them. Sad to see the company go out like this.

I'd be very interested in learning why Cue is calling it quits -- I really loved the concept behind their service. Has anyone managed to find their contact information?

Cue (shutdown), Don.na (pivoted), Tempo, Sunrise, Google Now, others. Fascinating space with a lot of competition. But has any of these products gotten close to a revenue model?

Throw in some of the mail clients and other apps like Sparrow, Mailbox, and Fantastical and from the outside, it seems more like acqui-hires to absorb the product and team into a bigger company is the way to go.

Quite unfortunate.

I liked Greplin and it really helped me several times to find 'missing' tweets and FB posts. When they pivoted and changed the name, the search part became below par. So I stopped using it entirely.

I do not know why they changed the previously good generic name and the original focus. I am sure they probably had more info than I do.

As we create more content scattered all over, personal search is becoming more useful. I hope something good comes again.

Best of luck to the team on what ever they do next.

Maybe they got an NSL - sudden shutdown, all data deleted...

That was my first thought as well.

NSL?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Letter

I thought that as well when I first read what they posted. Of course even with the NSA revelations I would have expected them to delete the data right away so maybe I am just reading too much into it.

I think this is definitely a pivot, judging by the founder's YC experience (http://thenextweb.com/entrepreneur/2011/03/05/greplin-founde...).

They're very smart, I'm sure whatever they build next will be even better.

Is this the same Cue that Apple bought?

http://techcrunch.com/2013/10/03/why-did-apple-buy-cue-becau...

Yes, I believe so.

It would be nice when a company is shuttered or acquired for it to briefly state what it did in the announcement. I saw one business last night that had been acquired by Google with no mention of its purpose.

I used Greplin quite a few times to find where I had heard something or seen a link. It was useful in that respect. But not useful enough to pay for. I never saw much of a monetization model going for them.

Why?

They were in my top 5 favorite startups. Were they killed by Siri and Google Now?

This is a real bummer - our company's first office was right next to Greplin and they were amazingly smart and quite nice. Good luck to the team.

I find it weird that this company would be shutting down just as everyone is raving about Shel and Roberts book: Age Of Context. I might reach out to the guys at cue and see what they noticed that is leading them to shutdown/pivot to a new business.

Was sad to see what happened to Cue. It's another example of a great idea with terrible timing. How do you compete when the biggest players in the game join the race?

Cheers guys, there was obvious talent on your team! Interested to see what comes next...

Sad to hear, as I had discovered them recently and was interested in the problems they were tackling. I guess this isn't a complete surprise, with their Twitter account looking inactive as of late.

Wow, not such a sad ending after all. It looks like they got acquired by Apple for between $40 million and $60 million; no wonder their shut down message on their website didn't state that they ran out of money or something. http://techcrunch.com/2013/10/03/cue-acquired-for-over-40m-l...

Cuedown.com you mean ?

From what I can tell, and what I've heard from friends of the company, they shut down Cue the product, not the company.

The team is likely working on a new product.

They would have done a pivot if they were indeed working on a new product. Like they did with Greplin.

Did Cue every receive any buyout / exit options?

Wow, sad to hear this. They had an outstanding service.

Until I read the message on their homepage, I never realized they had a premium service!

That's a shame, very cool concept. I wish them all the best. What was their actual business model though? Anyone know?

Freemium. You could get basic functionality for free, but certain tasks would cost money. I seem to remember thinking that the balance between what was free and what was paid was a bit off.

I see now. So they were trying to go off of in app purchases? That's not a bad way to do it. I think the problem is monetizing a service like that WITH competitors like google now is just a hard problem in general. I could see where it would be a good idea if they had some good lockin. It was definitely worth an attempt.

Why can't they open source their code?

I'm curious. did they say they can't?

https://github.com/Cue

ah, how unfortunate! as a user, would love to see some / all of their stuff become open sourced, if possible.

I was using their product, I paid for their product and they shut it down without notice ? Classy move !

We have essentially the same functionality coming out soon. Register at ark.com

Interested to know what you think about them shutting down then. Seems like they were quite far along... Any insight on what changed their mind or what you will do differently?

Why?

For those of you that will miss Cue and Greplin, there is hope. We are about to release our cloud search feature at StartHQ.

Here's a screencast - search is towards the end: https://www.dropbox.com/s/04rrwxuuvkzpyrp/starthq.mp4

You can sign up here: https://starthq.com

Please use the Feedback form to let us know which services you'd like us to support and we will prioritize them for launch.

PS. For a bit of background on us, here's a blog post that was on the front page of HN on Monday http://www.arcticstartup.com/2013/09/30/starthq-capitalizes-...

PPS. Sad to see Greplin go, loved the service but was too afraid to give access to my data at all times, so ended up building our federated search which doesn't require that. Would be very interested to know more about what happened.

This has nothing to do with Cue/Greplin.

Did you watch the screencast to the end? i ran a search and got personalized results from all my web apps like Gmail and AngelList. How is this not like Greplin?

I know you're just trying to promote your company, but it feels a little like handing out business cards at a funeral. Sure, you can do it, but it seems little tacky. This post is still in the mourning phase. It will probably move on to the post-mortem, what is a replacement for it phase tomorrow or Friday.

So it did come across as dancing one Greplin's grave - thank you for clarifying that.

I'm sorry. Next time I'll refrain from posting comments when I've only had two hours of sleep the night before.

Does it matter? he advertises that page on pretty much all of his comments.

Yes, I do promote my startup whenever I can, but am always on topic. Why the negativity? Is it wrong to be vocal or do you feel like I'm dancing on Greplin's grave?

Your post comes across (to me) as self-serving and somewhat socially awkward. The "PS" and "PPS", in particular, are quite crass and not the way to promote a company. You seem like someone who meets me at a keg party and jumps right into a pitch as soon as I tell you my name.

No offense; I just prefer HN comments to be less blatantly promotional.

I can't reply to Chris' comment for some reason, so posting the reply here:

I'm sorry that I came across as crass and socially awkward - I hope I can prove to you that I'm not so bad in person one day.

The PS and PPS are edits because I got excited about what this meant for us and realized I was being too self promotional esp. to people that knew nothing about us, so thought I'd give some background and clarify my feelings.

PS. No offence taken :)

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