5 lessons from Mailbox’s shut-down

The market for consumer productivity apps, which spurred companies like Dropbox and Evernote to multi-billion-dollar valuations, has proven to be mostly a mirage. Businesses are increasingly happy to buy software for their employees; people are often loath to buy software for themselves. And for all it did right, Mailbox never became anything more ... See more

But with a free tier to push the business, perhaps too many users were free and not enough were in the paying category. It seems that the writing might have been on the wall last June when the company announced it was laying off 14% of its workforce.

But Slack’s struggle to succeed as an independent company sadly mirrors that of many one-time innovators in enterprise productivity. Mailbox died and Acompli sold to Microsoft, where it became the mobile Outlook app. Evernote is a pale shadow of its former self. Of that early cohort, only Box and Dropbox became — and still remain — public companies... See more