Indie hacker opportunities in Google's graveyard
I remember listening to a story by Sam Parr on the My First Million podcast about how Google kills projects even if they made a few hundred million in revenue per year.
Hundred million a year!
Hell that's a whole lot of money! But it's a pittance to the multi-billion dollar business that is Google, so comparatively, it's nothing to them, and not worth the effort to pursue. These are good, functioning businesses, not just lame ones like Google+. Just killed because it's deemed too small for a giant.
But imagine the potential of these products for us non-giants – solo entrepreneurs, indie hackers, bootstrapped founders. Even a fraction of that hundred million dollar business will be a life-changing amount of money.
It'll be FU money. That kind of money that we can say we're free. Totally, financially free.
I wonder if people had ever looked through the graveyard of Google projects and made an indie version of it.
Just look through the ideas here on killedbygoogle.com (caveat: not mine). There's 264 of them currently. Just a quick scroll down shows some good potentials already:
App Maker (2016 - 2021)
App Maker was a tool that allowed its users to build and deploy custom business apps easily and securely on the web without writing much code. It was about 4 years old.
Google Photos Print (2020 - 2020)
Google Photos Print was a subscription service that automatically selected the best ten photos from the last thirty days which were mailed to user's homes. It was 5 months old.
Shoelace (2019 - 2020)
Shoelace was an app used to find group activities with others who share your interests. It was 11 months old.
These are great, isn't it? They might not all be million dollar revenue projects, but with some slight tweaks they can go on to be great indie products for niche audiences.
Makes me want to go make some now!
Great article Google killing their URL Shortener is what inspired me to build T.LY URL Shortener. My goal was to build a similar version that could take its place. Thanks for sharing!
Cool domain there! yeah since Google killed their URL shortener I was looking for less spammy ones that didn't require one to sign up. How's the progress/MRR on it so far?
Hey T.LY is growing! The browser extension just hit 400k users and TLY has 10 million short URLs and over 100 million redirects.
Oh yes I saw your interview with Nathan Latka! Awesome job man, loved your energy! You inspire me.
Thank you!
WOW 400k users! Awesome work dude. Do you share MRR too?
Thanks! Just passed 4.5k MRR
this article is so cool. thanks!
I linked it to my blog post https://whyboobo.com/startup/google-graveyard-projects/
Inspired me to look through gave yard :D
Thanks Bogdan! Hope it'll inspire you as much as it did for me!
(Btw, there's a typo in your blog post... the link says "...HN", but it should be IH)
Already inspired me. And all the comments below are crazy.
Thanks for seeing that typo, just fix it.
Great idea! Why reinvent the wheel when you can steal like an artist?
Exactly! One man's thrash is another man's treasure!
Hey thanks for sharing!!
I also listened to that episode, and was wondering if there was a quick way to find out what they tested.
Do you mean what Google tested and killed? Or if Sam and Shaan tried launching any of the killed products?
google
This is so interesting, bookmarked!
Me too! I keep going back to it for inspiration
I saved the site in my idea notebook. I also shared it in my telegram group of 50 people. :)
Oh nice! What Telegram group is this?
A group joined by those who subscribe to my YouTube channel. They speak Turkish. :)) t.me/youtubeugurkilci
wow! I would have never thought that a database like this existed haha.
Time to resurrect some of these concepts with renewed marketing and smaller niches.
Thank you for sharing!
Here's one that @jakobgreenfeld shared, with killed products from Amazon as well, and other startups!
https://www.failory.com/graveyard
dope dope dope 🤘
Found some nice ideas there indeed. Good source for ideas.
Note that some of the killed products were merged into others. For example, google maps now includes map-designer and trip-planner
Oh I see, didn't know that. Makes perfect sense that some of it would be merged rather than merely killed
Great post!
Wrote something similar a while ago: https://founderflywheel.com/framework-fill-the-gap/
Many big companies (not just Google) place many small bets and naturally, most of them simply don't work out. A business that plateaus at, say, $200k yearly revenue certainly does not move the needle for them. Many of these businesses that get shut down could be healthy "lifestyle" businesses.
My favorite example of this is Pinboard vs. Delicious
Delicious was a social bookmarking web service for storing, sharing, and discovering web bookmarks. In 2005 it was acquired by Yahoo for somewhere between $15 million and $30 million.
While Delicious had no strategic value to a big company like Yahoo, a robust social bookmarking web service could very much make for a profitable lifestyle business.
This was proven by Maciej Cegłowski who with Pinboard perfectly filled the gap left by Delicious. The service generates around $200k in yearly revenue.
Oh wow finally a real life example! (Though not directly from Google's graveyard but it still proves the point!)
Never knew about Pinboard - the landing page UI looks pretty dated. Surprised it has $200k revenue.
Btw love your post on Founder Flywheel - waaay better researched than this post of mine lol. "One man's thrash is another man's treasure" INDEED. I enjoyed clicking through the links you provided, especially the Failory graveyard.
Just signed up for your newsletter. Great stuff. 👍👍
I spotted this information too when listening to the MFM podcast. I can smell a potential here that is going after the bread crumbs from the giant's table, but one has to be careful. Killing a project is often a business decision such as eliminating redundancy, they are following a big picture vision not just making money. I think you need some inside information or hard study to make use of the graveyard.
Something similar, a VC-funded startup has to figure out a scalable business model before running out of money. If I can understand what they have discovered, I could use a similar model in my little niche or vertical.
Yeah there's probably many reasons behind the curtain why Google killed it which we will never know. But those reasons don't have to stop us indie hackers because we're not *like" Google or one of their acquired startups. We can always minimize downsides by creating rough MVPs, launching low cost bets fast on one of the graveyard ideas.
Interesting site!
I knew Google killed off a lot of projects, but I had no idea there were that many in the graveyard. There are a bunch that I think would be difficult to pull off without the disposable resources Google has (or at least much more than a typical indie hacker comes to the table with) but there's also a bunch that an indie hacker or a small team could definitely take a stab at.
Would also be interesting to see which of them have been tried by someone other than Google before or after they got axed.
Yes for sure - some need proper VC funded startups to do it. A lot are possible by indies. I'm really curious to see ex-Google product turned indie projects that got some success!
Btw that site not made by me (in case you were wondering...)
Agreed. I'm interested to see the successful ones too!
I was curious if it was your site or not. Cool either way. Very simple but gets the point across well.
Just a note on that Photos thing:
https://www.google.com/photos/printing/photo-prints/
Wonder if what they've done is just remove the automatic subscription part and let people go self serve... Building a service on top of this might actually be even easier depending on what people are willing to pay.
I also wonder where other print providers are price wise. Some analysis of what they offer, prices could make for a pretty darn good product.
I also wonder if using access to more pictures (Facebook/Google/Apple) would be enough to make it more enticing.
They are in the top 3 most trafficked sites. You need that kind of traffic to generate millions of dollars. The products are also not something one person can build in a few months. There is a channel risk where you may not be able to reach the buyers cost effectively.
Need lots of traffic? Nah. Just start with a small niche of potential customers, serve them well and expand outwards later if there's traction.
Millions of dollars? That's nice but as a solo indie hacker, I don't need revenue at millions to justify the product's existence. Even a $1000 MRR is enough for an indie hacker, single and living in a low cost location.
Not one person can build? Scope it down to it's 1-2 most viral features and launch as an rough MVP.