// startup autopsy

Readmill

Won Apple Design Award for beautiful social reading — but Kindle, iBooks, and Google Books owned ebook distribution; Readmill couldn't acquire books through its app

platform dependencyAcqui-hired

Fatal mistake: Readmill built a beautiful ebook reading app with social highlighting — share passages, see what friends highlighted, discuss books. Raised $1.5M from Creandum. Won Apple Design Award. Kindle (Amazon), iBooks (Apple), Google Play Books all dominated ebook distribution. Readmill had no ebook store — users had to import files. Dropbox acquired Readmill in 2014 for the engineering team (acqui-hire). Readmill shut April 2014.

Founded	2011
Closed	2014
Country	Sweden
Sector	Social

50%

Key Events Timeline

2011

FOUNDING

2013

FUNDING

2014

SHUTDOWN

Full Analysis

Analyst plan

Documented cause

Readmill raised $1.5M. Won Apple Design Award. Amazon/Apple/Google owned ebook DRM ecosystems. Readmill couldn't sell books. Dropbox acquired for team 2014. Shut April 2014....

Verified lesson

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€3.8M

Peak valuation

HypeCycle · MoatType · ResearchTags

Readmill raised €1.5M before readmill built a beautiful ebook reading app with social highlighting — share passages, see what friends highlighted, discuss books. raised $1.5m from creandum. won apple design award. kindle (amazon), ibooks (apple), google play books all dominated ebook distribution. readmill had no ebook store — users had to import files. dropbox acquired readmill in 2014 for the engineering team (acqui-hire). readmill shut april 2014. ended it. See the documented cause, verified lesson and all failure signals.

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