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November 6, 2013 10:57 pm GMT
Not all exits have to see a product disappear. Case in point:Origami, the family-focused social service that arose from YCombinator-backed mobile social networkEveryme’searlier efforts, has been sold. The acquirer eFamily, based in Indiana, has taken over the company’s branding and software, and will continue to develop and support the product, which is good news for current users. However, the Bay Area team from Origami Labs is not joining eFamily – instead, they were quietly “acqui-hired” by Nest several weeks ago. The entire six-person Origami Labs team, including founder and CEO Vibhu Norby, is now at Nest, working in various engineering and design roles. Norby says that Origami Labs had other good offers on the table for his company, but none that would have kept the product alive. “eFamily was the best one that we had there,” he says. For background,Origami publicly launched its family-focused sharing service earlier this summer, after a year of development. The product was something of a spin-off of Everyme, a private messaging and photo-sharing app that never really took off, despite having raised $3.66 million in outside funding. But Everyme allowed the startup to gain some early insights it used to build Origami. For example, the company found that around half of Everyme’s users were families, so Origami was built with that group’s needs in mind. The new service offered a web and mobile platform (iOS and Android) that allowed families to post text, photos and videos, create photo albums, and receive email digests. Early on, Origami found a foothold with new parents, who represented a large majority of the site’s earliest adopters at launch. Said Norby at the time, new parents take and share the most photos, but they also had the biggest desire for privacy. Shortly after launching, Origami also acquired acompeting serviceFamilyLeaf, another YC startup. The two companies worked together to help transition FamilyLeaf users to Origami, but FamilyLeaf’s team moved on. That startup had around 7,500 registered families at the time of its own acquisition. Today, the two services have over 40,000 users combined. Origami also had 40,000 sign-ups from its beta program, but that doesn’t speak to its paying users or actives, which are “significantly less.” Users were charged $5 per month for their private family websites – a price point that wasn’t well-suited to a venture-backed company storing a lot of documents, Norby now believes. He also sees some similarities
Original Link: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/Ho8QYkcasJI/
Y Combinator-Backed Origami Labs Acquired By eFamily, But Service Lives On
Not all exits have to see a product disappear. Case in point:Origami, the family-focused social service that arose from YCombinator-backed mobile social networkEveryme’searlier efforts, has been sold. The acquirer eFamily, based in Indiana, has taken over the company’s branding and software, and will continue to develop and support the product, which is good news for current users. However, the Bay Area team from Origami Labs is not joining eFamily – instead, they were quietly “acqui-hired” by Nest several weeks ago. The entire six-person Origami Labs team, including founder and CEO Vibhu Norby, is now at Nest, working in various engineering and design roles. Norby says that Origami Labs had other good offers on the table for his company, but none that would have kept the product alive. “eFamily was the best one that we had there,” he says. For background,Origami publicly launched its family-focused sharing service earlier this summer, after a year of development. The product was something of a spin-off of Everyme, a private messaging and photo-sharing app that never really took off, despite having raised $3.66 million in outside funding. But Everyme allowed the startup to gain some early insights it used to build Origami. For example, the company found that around half of Everyme’s users were families, so Origami was built with that group’s needs in mind. The new service offered a web and mobile platform (iOS and Android) that allowed families to post text, photos and videos, create photo albums, and receive email digests. Early on, Origami found a foothold with new parents, who represented a large majority of the site’s earliest adopters at launch. Said Norby at the time, new parents take and share the most photos, but they also had the biggest desire for privacy. Shortly after launching, Origami also acquired acompeting serviceFamilyLeaf, another YC startup. The two companies worked together to help transition FamilyLeaf users to Origami, but FamilyLeaf’s team moved on. That startup had around 7,500 registered families at the time of its own acquisition. Today, the two services have over 40,000 users combined. Origami also had 40,000 sign-ups from its beta program, but that doesn’t speak to its paying users or actives, which are “significantly less.” Users were charged $5 per month for their private family websites – a price point that wasn’t well-suited to a venture-backed company storing a lot of documents, Norby now believes. He also sees some similaritiesOriginal Link: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/Ho8QYkcasJI/
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