We are shutting Refinder down

With a sad eye we announce today: We are shutting down. We did not see the uptake in usage and growth that would be needed to run this Software company as a profitable business.

The last few years at Gnowsis have been very valuable years for us. Now we conclude our journey. For users of Refinder, this means:

  • You can no longer create new accounts.
  • We will shut down Refinder by 6th December 2013.
  • You can log in until then.
  • You can export your data until 6th December here:
    https://www.getrefinder.com/account/export/setup/
  • As part of our privacy policy, we will delete all your data unrecoverably after 6th December. 

If you are looking for a great way to organize your information online, check out:

  • Mindmeister to gather ideas and collaborate with others using mindmaps
  • Hojoki to stay up to date on the activities of your team across cloud apps

Although this is not a happy moment, there are many things but especially people we are grateful for.

First of all - you. All the users and followers of Refinder who gave us feedback and showed interest in our products.

We want to thank our past team members:

  • Berkant Kölem, Marketing
  • Chris Brand, Copywriting
  • Franz Jachim, Strategy
  • Gerhard Grossberger, Coding
  • Giovanna Roda, Coding
  • Hannes Stiebitzhofer, Strategic Consulting, Advisor
  • Ingrid Brunner-Sauermann, Controlling
  • Maciej Pasternacki, Operations
  • Martina Gallova, Marketing
  • Petra Wolkenstein, Marketing, Sales, Strategic Consulting
  • Tomasz Trela, Coding
  • Yegor Shovgenya, Coding

Our loved ones and our families supported Refinder and Gnowsis with many resources and personal support.

We also want to thank our advisors, investors, consultants and supporting funding agencies.

One lesson to pass on: We are very glad to have used customer development by Steve Blank. Working by this method gave us useful feedback as how to improve Refinder. But we tried other approaches before and in the end, there wasn't enough time to iterate further. If you are in the process of building up a business, from our experience, we can highly recommend doing the things Steve Blank recommends.

If you have any questions, write to info@gnowsis.com. 

Yours, Leo Sauermann & Bernhard Schandl, Founders.

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Comments

Any chance of opensourcing your code (GPL or Apache) ?

Thanks for the question. We are not evaluating opensourcing our code right now. If you have something specific in mind, contact me (info@gnowsis.com) and I can evaluate if we open-source parts of our codebase.