Pipes News

History

Pipes was founded by Vinay Anand and Siddharth Goliya, two Mumbai-based students from NMIMS University. This is their fourth venture together of similar nature. It is currently bootstrapped and funded solely by their earnings from Doodle Creatives, a web design, social media and content development agency started by them in 2012.

Pipes’ beta version saw itself go live on the 19th March, 2014. The app had a simple display which included a list view of all your Pipes. However, despite its clean interface it looked too simple. TNW labeled Pipes as a “Simple mobile news reader” but also mentioned that Pipes could be worth checking out. In spite of this, after a fairly positive response, the company decided to launch the full version of the application.

Within the first week of its launch Pipes found itself all over the web, including inside Gizmodo’s top apps of the month.

On 18 June 2014, the application was finally launched. This version had a complete redesign, each Pipe was supported with images. In terms of functionality, customized Push Notifications, Wikipedia & Tweets about your Pipes were added. TechCrunch wrote “Pipes is well designed and straight forward to setup and use. The app provides feeds of popular articles on the subject matter at hand, as well as tweets and even the item’s Wikipedia page, for reference.” Tablet support was included as well.

Gizmodo UK too covered Pipes in July as the best apps of the month. This was the 2nd time that Pipes was covered by Gizmodo.

Pipes did a compelling update in the first week of October where it launched summary. Pipes is one of the few apps that summarises articles without the use of editors. TechCrunch gave Pipes another feature on the 2nd of October, where it spoke about Pipes’ summary feature and custom push notifications in grave detail.

On last update in October, TechCrunch’s article mentions Pipes had over 70,000 users and was closing in on a seed investment of a million dollars.

Pipes also launched a campaign called Demo Apple Watch on 7 January 2015, the day Apple Watch’s release date was set in May. This campaign got almost 8,50,000 views on the website and featured by 9 to 5 Mac, TNW, IB Times, Business Insider, Telegraph, Daily Mail, BGR amongst countless others. They received over 150 coverages in 5 hours. The servers were so packed that only one out of four users were able to access the website.

Pipes released its recent update, 2.0 in February 2015 and got exclusive coverage from TNW which stated, “Pipes 2.0, which was released today, comes with a beautiful new design that makes the app much more visually appealing and easier to use.” This coverage spoke greatly about the new “Pipeline”tab that gives you a mashup of the news from all the pipes you subscribe to.

After a year long beta, Pipes went live on 14th October 2015 and is now available on the App Store. Pipes received a lot of coverages on the very first day, some of them being Inc42, App Advice, iPhone Informer, iFree Press, List hunt, iOSnoops, Your Story, Adweek & 148 apps

Reception

Pipes got its first feature on TNW in the 3rd week of March, 2014.

Pipes was covered by TechCrunch on 27th June, 2014. This led to the app getting 10,000 downloads in 2 hours, which resulted in the application crashing due to excess traffic on the server. TechCrunch covered Pipes’ summary feature in detail in its 2nd feature on 2 October 2014.

Pipes was also in the top apps of the month a couple of times on Gizmodo’s charts. For the months of March & July, Pipes had its feature on Gizmodo.