Over the past 2 years since the shutdown I worked a few different side and passion projects. Conveniently, these were some projects I could reuse for Blend if I ever decided to relaunch it again. When I thought back on Blend 1.0, I assessed what went wrong, the problem, the solution, my approaches, processes, difficulty putting together a team, articulating the message, branding, and a lot more.
After the shut-down in 2016, a lot of things happened. There was the Series A Crunch, a serious dip in mobile investment, but more interestingly I started to notice a stagnation in mobile usage and in some ways a decline in mobile apps. There were articles about "App Fatigue" and App fragmentation.
Many of the Venture Capital funded mobile app competitors I had either
I went from seeing almost 12-15 competitors down to just 3-4 top ones. Combined with the trend of reduced app usage/fragmentation, this seemed like a time to re-enter the market with Blend. 2.0. The timing also felt right.