A learning school
Around this time, I release Lilisto, a personal bookmark manager. It’s pretty innovative from the go, offering new concepts such as dynamic categorization, advanced sorting and autosuggesting similar favourite links. I’m in a position to iterate fast and the service booms, growing to more than 250.000 active users in a few years (who collectively manage over a million unique URLs) and being amongst the 100.000 most visited websites, as ranked by Alexa. I’m young, impressed and… inexperienced.
I fail to monetize and, ignorant of potential investment, become a victim of my own success. Unable to upkeep server costs, the service intermittently yo-yo’s and goes down in 2009.
Three years later and feeling encouraged by user feedback (and less cash-strapped), I attempt a revival by rebranding and rebuilding but it’s too late. With web browsers having vastly improved their own management and a market now saturated with similar offerings, abandon rate is high and the service dwindles and eventually dies out in 2014.