Brewster, The Hyped Contacts Manager That Launched Last Year, Has Lost All Of Its Original Employees
There are a mix of reasons for why all the employees have left, but this source says it's mostly due to concern over the app's poor user engagement and acquisition and frustration over founder Steve Greenwood's management style and vision for the company.
It's unclear how many active users Brewster has.
In an interview, Greenwood wouldn't comment on the employee departures or the number of users Brewster has, but did say he was happy with the team of eight people he has in place now. He also added that Brewster was gearing up for an update this fall with new features and the company's investors were happy with the product's direction.
Brewster launched in July 2012 to a lot of hype. In fact, so many people tried to download the app on day one that the service crashed. The app pulls in contact information from your phone and social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter and merges them all together. The idea is to have a dynamic contacts list that automatically updates whenever someone changes jobs, moves, or gets a new phone number. The startup raised an undisclosed amount last year from Union Square Ventures and other investors.
Before starting Brewster, Greenwood worked at a startup called Drop.io, an online file sharing service that Facebook bought in 2010.