Back in May, Woomoo, the startup behind app prototyping tool POP, was acqui-hired by Priceline, leaving POP’s future a little uncertain. Today that uncertainty comes to an end with news that the U.K.’s Marvel, a rival web and app design platform, has acquired the company’s tech and user-base and will soon migrate POP’s 500,000 users over to its own wares. Terms of the deal remain undisclosed.
“Earlier this year, the POP team joined Priceline, leaving the POP tech and users needing a new home,” Marvel co-founder Murat Mutlu tells me. “The founder of POP, Ben Lin, reached out in the summer and after discussing our visions for design platforms it was clear our aspirations for our users and the industry aligned perfectly”.
Mutlu says that Lin, despite his team’s soft landing at Priceline, was determined to ensure POP’s users were looked after rather than shutting the service down. “We’ve been working closely with the team over the past couple of months to ensure a smooth transition from POP to Marvel. POP users will be able to sign in to Marvel using the same account details and find all their projects waiting for them,” he explains.
That will see Marvel notifying POP users of the switch over date and guiding them through the transition in the coming months. It also means Marvel’s design and prototyping platform can now boast over 1 million registered users, with around 35,000 new users currently signing up each month. In addition, I’m told that a lot of POP users reside within large enterprises and education and sit in Marvel’s sweet spot of people who have ideas but not necessarily the skills or tools to develop those ideas.
Adds Mutlu: “When I first reached out to you back in 2014, prototyping was still finding its feet as part of the workflow but fast forward today you’ll be hard pressed to find any product teams that don’t prototype before shipping due to it being so easy with tools like Marvel. But I still think there’s a long way to go to make design more accessible and inclusive, we’re working hard on making that happen. The POP acquisition is a part of that plan”.