Justin Williams brings the unfortunate but inevitable news about the end of Glassboard:

Over the last year we have tried a variety of different methods of converting Glassboard into a sustainable business. The reality is that we failed to do that.

Starting next week, we will be converting everyone’s account to a premium account for the remaining few weeks so that you can export your boards and keep an archive should you desire.

I’m sad to see Glassboard go away. It was the first Android app I wrote, and I have great memories with the team of friends I worked with at Sepia Labs. I feel bad for Justin that he invested so much time and money in keeping Glassboard alive only to see it fail to gain traction.

For me personally, Glassboard was a reaction to the whittling away of online privacy. I’m proud to have worked on something that said “privacy is important” at a time when so many other apps were sharing, leaking, and even stealing, your private information. None of us foresaw Edward Snowden, of course, but we did foresee a backlash against the loss of privacy which I believe is still in its infancy.

It would be easy to blame Glassboard’s failure on users’ lack of concern for their privacy, but I think it had more to do with our flawed initial experience and downright terrible business model.

Our initial user experience made it hard to get started with the app, which killed any chance of the viral growth necessary to build a large user base. And we did so little to promote our premium version that very few Glassboard users knew we even had a premium version (and those that were aware of it saw little reason to upgrade).

There’s certainly no guarantee Glassboard would’ve succeeded had we not made those mistakes – as Brent Simmons points out, an app like Glassboard “is going to be a challenge no matter what” – but I do think those mistakes guaranteed it wouldn’t succeed.