{UPDATE} see the comment on this article from Feed My Inbox co-founder Nick Francis – in which he explains a lot more about the service (many thanks Nick).
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Bread of heaven, bread of heaven
Feed me till I want no more;
Feed me till I want no more.
I was a customer of Feed My Inbox. It did (and for a few weeks more, still does) a useful but unglamourous service, which is take an RSS feed and turn it into email. This was great for sites that either publish now and then, like this blog, or for daily summaries of news. I even had a sign up box on this blog, recommending it.
But the service is closing down. On the homepage, the company says:
After much consideration, we have made the difficult decision to shut down Feed My Inbox over the course of the next couple of months.
Long story short, we failed to generate enough revenue to sustain the business long-term and justify the time necessary for ongoing support, maintenance and feature development.
We wish it turned out differently, but our team learned a great deal over the last 4+ years. Thank you for being a customer.
I don’t know much about the company, but I do know that it was a small outfit – perhaps just four people. I learned this from digging around on Brightwurks, which is the site owner. The company was private, so there aren’t any numbers to digest, but in one blog post the company mentioned 175,000 customers.
What isn’t clear is whether these are paying customers or not. It operated on a freemuim model – the basic service of 5 feeds was free, and then you paid for additional premium features and more feeds, starting at $5 per month.
As far as I can see it, the problem with Feed My Inbox was three-fold.
1a) Freemium doesn’t work unless you have massive scale. Because, unless you provide a killer app, most people will just stick to the free version. And then if someone offers a similar service, you are stuck – it’s hard to change the barriers between services without annoying paying customers, or attracting new ones.
1b) Freemium is a bad model for development. Paying customers fund the growth in non-paying free-riders, with the hope that some of them eventually turn into payers too. Very little of the revenues from paying customers is ploughed back into improving their service.
2) Email is a cluttered mess. There are too many newsletters, bills, updates etc, nevermind all the crap emails that people actually write, nevermind the spam. So adding to all that isn’t particularly appealing to lots of people who are already swamped.
3) Hello social media. Facebook and Twitter are far better places to follow or like stuff you are interested in, making email seem a quaint, antiquated way of getting updates. That’s without considering RSS readers like netvibes or Google Reader.
So that’s it. But you can bow out gracefully, which is the case here.
The Feed My Inbox team have put together a very helpful page of tips on other services and ways to migrate, which I think is above and beyond. Can you imagine a bank doing that? But thanks to them, I am now using blogtrottr.com, and have a sign up form on the blog for that service, and the whole service seems very good.
I just hope it lasts. It’s free.
