Headup makers of a Wikipedia info popup information utility are calling it quits on 2/28/2011. Citing lack of success in an Email sent to users of Headup (including moi) early this morning:
Hi there,
Following our previous email, we wanted to let you know that by the end of February we’re going to discontinue the Headup Widget for websites service.
We appreciate the time and effort that you took to use it. It’s been a great experience for us, and we hope you enjoyed the product as well.
There are many reasons for this, but the bottom line is that it just wasn’t successful enough to warrant future development.
The Headup widget will stop functioning on February 28th, 2011.If you are a WordPress or Joomla user, we highly recommend that you uninstall it from the plugins page before the end of the month.
Other users should simply remove the script from their HTML files.
If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us.Thanks for the feedback and support along the way, you’ve all been great.
All the best,
The Headup team.
I use the Headup widget here on my blog to allow people to get popup information on keywords such as Email, Facebook, Notifications, Life, NBC, Community (picked randomly from recent posts). According to the WordPress Codex site Headup has as of this publishing 10,754 downloads. So there are at least that many people like me seeking alternatives. I am going to start looking at alternatives but Wikipop is looking the most promising right now.
“Lack of success” = Lack of Profit
With the pressures to provide everything for free these days, many people are raising the question about free content and free applications. In fact if you follow @GiniDietrich’s blog she did a piece recently about charging for content. In that article she cited a recent Harvard Business Review podcast “Finding Profit in a World of Free” which is a very interesting piece that discusses the topic in depth.
Good bye Headup, it was indeed nice knowing you. Thanks for the free software and good luck to everyone. I only wish that your monetization strategy had worked because I thought you had a pretty awesome tool.
Photo Credit Peter Kaminski
It’s SO HARD to figure out how to make money on the web. I wonder if Headup had asked it’s users (you) how to make money if that would have made a difference? What advice would you have given them?
@ginidietrich wow Gini, great question. I was looking at their team and their investors earlier today while I was writing this and honestly they seem a little heavy. So my advice to them would have been to lean things dow.n and closely engage their customers (as you suggested) and enlist their support for making the product viable. They easily could have built a community around their product like hootsuite livefyre and amplifytheweb
@hackmanj See…we’re all becoming social companies yet so few actually engage their users. Sad.
@ginidietrich it does create opportunity for those who are willing,
Hi Joe,
Thanks for taking the time to write this post about Headup. The entire Headup team was very happy to learn that you liked the service.
Indeed it was lack of a valid business model that drove our decision. To clarify, we did reach out to our users and we were in discussions with quite a few of them to see if there’s any way to keep the service alive.
After learning that direct monetization is not a valid option, we decided to re-focus our energy in a different direction.
As you can imagine, letting a product go is a very hard and emotional decision. That being said, our team decided that it is the right thing to do.
Sincerely,
Tal Keinan
Founder and CEO,
SemantiNet
@TalKeinan Hi Tal, thank you for taking the time to read and respond to this post. Your story is not at all unfamiliar. I imagine it has been hard for you and your team.
In hind sight do you have any advice that you’d like to share with anyone that might read this?
Wishing you great success in your next venture,
Joe
@ginidietrich I just quoted your comment in my latest post:
http://joehackman.com/2011/02/hyperalerts-provides-a-hint-of-monetization-strategy/
Thanks Gini!
Joe
It was doomed to fail from the start Joe. I have never heard of the widget. And we all know unless I know about something it will never gain widespread acceptance in the marketplace. I mean you would of thought that one of their employees would of sent me a Donut and a request to try it/review it. Definitely very poor business development and planning on their part.
On that note I am sorry to see it affect anyone like yourself.
@HowieSPM Maybe that’s because you only have 271 livefyre points vs ginidietrich with her 422! You know the key to freebies is high scores, come on Howie, get with the program. 🙂
Yes, it is unfortunate to lose Headup, it was a cool service. Lessons to be learned for sure, I am sure @TalKeinan and his guys will do some more cool stuff.
Thanks for your comment and humor on my Monday morning.
Joe