Referral generator application Spreadable caught quite a bit of buzz over the last year… Killer Startups wrote a glowing review of their digital word-of-mouth widget; the ReadWriteBiz blogged about Spreadable; Digital Plunge wrote a rave review of Spreadable in a Digital Marketing Spotlight, and there’s no doubt the statistics looked great!:
So, how successful was Spreadable for the Grasshopper Group? According to Jonathan Kay, those Spreadable leads converted to customers at a rate of 20 percent! That’s quite an accomplishment when you consider that Grasshopper was converting between 1-2 percent of relevant organic search traffic.
A client recently (last week, recently) signed up for an account on Spreadable.com, eager to take advantage of those kind of numbers. But, over the weekend, Spreadable closed its doors! In an email to customers who had already signed up for the service, the Spreadable Team said that all current customers would be refunded fully, and also “We’ll be writing a case study about the experience which will be published in the next few weeks to help other entrepreneurs learn from our experience.”
I’ll look forward to reading that case study — what caused this abrupt end to a successful endeavor? And, in the meantime, I’ll reminisce about other Apps-that-used-to-be. Like Google Wave *sniff* there isn’t even anything left to link to.
