Notifo, a YC-backed company we once described as a “simple mobile notifications platform for anything”, is shuttering the windows and heading for the deadpool.
The idea was simple enough: Notifo would pipe real-time notifications from just about anywhere — be it Twitter, or Hacker News, or Github, or Facebook, or any Growl-compatible app on your computer — to your mobile device, long before most of these services had apps that could handle that duty themselves. Later down the road, Notifo doubled down their server’s functionality by tossing in free user-to-user chat.
Alas, the product just never managed to find a userbase.
In a world where just about every service has come to have an app of their very own, a service like Notifo has unfortunately become a bit redundant. Meanwhile, competing alternatives like Boxcar (on the app side) and Urban Airship (on the publisher/server side) have filled in any lingering gaps.
Notifo founder Chad Etzel says he’s already moved on to another job (Update: according to his personal blog, he’s now at Twilio. Congrats, Chad!), while co-founder Paul Stamatiou moved onto PicPlum (which we covered here) a while ago. Notifo will stay functional until the server money runs dry — but from this point on, there will be no further development effort.