Whatever Happened to Obliterase?
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At Spiceworld 2014 I met the Obliterase team and spoke to them quite a bit. They were the first product that was built in the Spiceworks ecosystem. They product is just an add on to SW, not a product on its own. They were doing well, we were told, and very excited about the relationship. But Obliterase went silent immediately following Spiceworld and their vendor page hasn't been updated since then, and they lost their "Green Guy" status long ago, no idea when. They don't even casually post or anything (their last few "year ago" posts were just comments in the water cooler.) Their website is still up but... are they still around? What happened? They were not at Spiceworld London just a few months after their big Austin debut and they were not in Austin the following year. Given that that is their sole audience, seems odd not to make a point of pushing to them.
Anyone know what happened to them?
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What's really funny is if the you search on them, their tag line is "Leave No Trace" and because things in Spiceworks always get "in Spiceworks" appended, the search results on the first page literally says "Obliterase leave no trace in Spiceworks" as if it is a news headline. But that is exactly what happened, no trace of them seems to be left.
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I've PM'd everyone who worked for the company. Odd that their rep at Spiceworld never got an account of her own.
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Oh... and this came up because they PM'd me in 2014 and I just got around to following up on it. I went to respond and realized I never got responses from them long ago, they weren't green anymore, I'd not heard anything more from them and so looked up their history. Steve and Tucker were their two community people. Steve was in Austin in 2014.
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@scottalanmiller said:
Oh... and this came up because they PM'd me in 2014 and I just got around to following up on it. I went to respond and realized I never got responses from them long ago, they weren't green anymore, I'd not heard anything more from them and so looked up their history. Steve and Tucker were their two community people. Steve was in Austin in 2014.
They were supposed to cover my trip to SWL14, and while they got my flight, they never reimbursed me for my hotel. No response to my emails.
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@Kelly said:
@scottalanmiller said:
Oh... and this came up because they PM'd me in 2014 and I just got around to following up on it. I went to respond and realized I never got responses from them long ago, they weren't green anymore, I'd not heard anything more from them and so looked up their history. Steve and Tucker were their two community people. Steve was in Austin in 2014.
They were supposed to cover my trip to SWL14, and while they got my flight, they never reimbursed me for my hotel. No response to my emails.
Oh that's right, I totally forgot about that. I remember talking to you about that at SW now. Had no idea that they had bailed on covering their contest, though. Seems to be a trend with SpiceWorld contests!
From the "only works with Spiceworks" limitation and the "no longer on Spiceworks" combination, I am guessing that they went under a few weeks after Spiceworld. Weird that they put so much into advertising and didn't stay around to reap any rewards. Even if the event had gone gang busters for them, they didn't last long enough to leverage it.
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I think that it is a natural problem with making a paid add on to a free product, no matter how big the community is around it, the fact remains that the one commonality is that all of those people chose the product based on the point that it was free (and not open being okay.) While people who choose free things might buy other things, it's not a good starting point as a commonality. Making a point of doing sales solely to people who "weren't willing to pay for other things" makes little logical sense.
