Why a popular Austin app is shutting down

by Colin Morris
February 4, 2016

Developing an app isn’t all that different from being in an indie band.

In each case, it takes a lot of hard work and risk to ship the product, and you need a huge hit to make the kind of money you can live on.

Charlie Wood has been through both.

 

Indie cred

If you've lived here since before Austin became a boomtown, you may remember a local pop rock band called Javelin Boot. The scrappy trio of junior high schoolers formed in 1978, and their ascent through the city’s storied music scene spanned a 20-year career.

They had a small but fiercely devoted fanbase, but even with a record deal, Javelin Boot couldn’t find a foothold with broader audiences. When they broke up in 1998, fans were devastated.

One of those fans was Charlie Wood. He was a freshman studying Computer Science at UT Austin the year Javelin Boot released their full-length debut, The Mauve Album on their own label. In 1991, Javelin Boot was named best pop band at the Austin Music Awards.

Wood went on to become a software engineer at IBM and a community manager at iChat before working at a series of other tech companies and ultimately co-founding a couple of his own.

The most recent and noteworthy of those is Numerous, a data tracking app for Android, iOS and Apple Watch.

Wood created Numerous in 2013 with John Scalo, a 20-year veteran software developer and designer at Apple.

Numerous integrates with a host of other web services, such as calendars, bank accounts and Google Analytics to track the numbers that are important to you. Then it displays them on your phone or Apple Watch in a photo-rich, captivating mosaic.

It sounds complicated, but the app is surprisingly easy to use. That usability, combined with some familiar Apple gloss, has made it a hit with users and garnered favorable coverage from CNET to CNBC, VentureBeat, The Next Web, The Guardian and even Built In Austin.

Adoption began a steep incline last summer, when the app had fewer than 50,000 users, and reached a total of 150,000 last month. On Monday, the company tweeted that 7,000 users alone were using Numerous to count down to the next SpaceX launch.

The company tweeted again on Wednesday, this time with a bomb: The service is shutting down May 1.

 

“An order of magnitude” from profit

“People loved the app,” Wood said. “But ultimately we’re an order of magnitude away from the scale it would take to make this profitable.”

When Wood posted the announcement on the company’s blog Wednesday morning, several users commented they would have paid for the service, which has always been free.

Wood said he appreciated the sentiment, but it wouldn’t be enough.

“Even if 10 percent of our active users paid $1 per month, it wouldn’t be enough to keep the servers running,” he said.

Still, hope springs eternal for die-hard fans.

When they took to Twitter to mourn the app’s loss, some asked that Numerous release its source code so they can run the program on their own machines. Others even suggested other companies may be interested in acquiring and reviving the service.

Wood wasn’t sure that would work.

“We might release little snippets of open source code,” he said. “But it doesn’t make sense to release the entire thing. It’s a big, complex machine to run. Even at its smallest scale, it involves a lot of services. Not just because of they integrations, either — the service itself uses Amazon, Apple registration services, a database, and in addition to all the integrations, you need separate API keys for all that stuff.”

But Wood was less pessimistic about acquisition.

“We’re already getting some inbound interest,” he said. “I actually have a call in five minutes. We presume most of those are tire kickers until proven otherwise, but we’d certainly be open to exploring that if we found the right partner.”

Some have already speculated that partner could be the free integration platform IFTTT.

IFTTT (short for If This, Then That) tracks and acts on data from an array of websites and IoT devices, allowing non-programmers to assign actions to social media accounts and hardware triggered by actions on other integrated services and devices.

Unsurprisingly, IFTTT is popular with the same crowd now mourning Numerous. And yes, they integrate with one another.

“Of course we’d love for it to continue on,” Wood said. “If we found a bigger partner who had already solved some market issues we couldn’t crack, it could be a good fit.”

It’s safe to say the Numerous crowd is counting on it.

If we had a chance to open up
Try to find a spot we missed
Greatest fear we see so near
We won’t be here in another year
What a year

—Javelin Boot, Would You Believe Me?

 

Austin startup guides

LOCAL GUIDE
Best Companies to Work for in Austin
LOCAL GUIDE
Coolest Tech Offices in Austin
LOCAL GUIDE
Best Perks at Austin Tech Companies
LOCAL GUIDE
Women in Austin Tech