Indie hacker opportunities in Google's graveyard

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!

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

Great idea! Why reinvent the wheel when you can steal like an artist?

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.

This is so interesting, bookmarked!

I saved the site in my idea notebook. I also shared it in my telegram group of 50 people. :)

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!

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

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.

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.

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.

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.