I thought it several seconds. I even thought "wow this idea must be the dumbest...." before I loaded the comments of this thread and immediately realised that it was I who were dumb.
Actually, it tells us all a lot about the world when we think, even for the briefest moment "well, I guess, it isn't the most absurd thing I've heard".
I know this is meant as a joke, but as a just do some good in world service - it's not a bad idea: kind of like a hospice for startups.
Shutting down your baby is not a fun process. It's exponentially worse if it involves money from people close to you, laying off employees, and / or a very public notice to the whole (startup) world. I'm pretty sure everyone involved would be exhausted in every way. It would nice if there were people who could ease the pain. It's probably not something you conquer the world with, but it would make this place suck just a little less (maybe as a non-profit).
While I feel bad for the companies who relied on this service and must now write their own shutdown notices, it's their own fault for trusting a SaaS and not using a self-hosted solution.
They will be their own customer forever, so they can give themselves $10MM a month for the notice, and hence produces revenues of $120MM, and easily get a $6bn valuation.
Yeah but actually would have been better if they had registered the domain some time ago,let it bake for some time, and then put up the shutdown page and watch as HN commenters questions but took them somewhat seriously.
"We thought hard about the right label for our company, which would best convey our mission to the people in the industry. Now, I am very happy to say we came to a great final name. The idea of The Beginning and The End, expressed in a symmetrical bigram joined by a familiar and well-established TLD is just what conveys best the sense of our commitment to bring an information service that strives to stay in touch with the most recent failures on the startup scene, help the novice founders make the best informed decisions and thus contribute our little bit into making the world a better place." - CEO
Yeah, but I find it unconscionable that they even launched their MVP without an iOS and Android app - their service is _clearly_ worthless without push notifications.
Truth is, this service never quite delivered on their promise. When my last two startups closed shop, it took shutdownify over 3 days to process the first one, and the second was still a full two days to get up and running. At that point I could have just put together a page myself.
It didn't help that they rewrote their tech stack from Ruby to Node even as they were trying to find customers. In the end, the user doesn't care what it's built with.
It really is a company that is destined to fail: only during a bubble would such an idea get VC funding, but it's only after the bubble bursts that they'd have a hockey stick growth. It's an enigma wrapped up in a paradox
I think they could have served their shutdown notices off of nginx and then they could have held up under reddit hugs, or at least with cloudflare. Ultimately, a static page cannot be optimally served off of Node.
They really should have tried to find a way to keep going (longer than a day, at least!). There's going to be a lot of demand for this service in the coming year. Someone should buy their assets and wait for the coming bust^Wboom.
Unfortunately, I regret to inform you that the sum total of their assets is already freely available and downloadable on the web. I don't think they'll be able to sell them for much after that sort of IP disaster. Another business destroyed by CTRL-S piracy. When will the browser vendors take this sort of thing seriously and put DRM on web pages?
The problem with this business model is clearly that if a company is shutting down it has severe cashflow problems and would not be willing to pay for a SaaS service for such a thing as trivial as a shutdown notice. It really is a badly formed business model and is rampant in this 'oh lets get a good team and we can always pivot if we fuck up' world.
This kind of start up irks mes as a sign that we have really reached the top of the bubble. Really sell your SF real estate now. Its is going to crash. It is such a waste of developer talent to put effort into hapless startups like this. I would like to know which fools invested in this so I can avoid taking their investment too.
</ Look someone has to take it seriously ;-D >
Edit: Damn this backfired. The downvoterz haz spoken!
Well-done satire...having the blog run on Tumblr and using a barely modified Bootstrap template, with parallax scrolling over a background image of a Brooklyn coffee house would've made it perfect.
107 comments
[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 176 ms ] threadUnfortunately it looks like they ran out of runway soon after the pivot.
Shutting down your baby is not a fun process. It's exponentially worse if it involves money from people close to you, laying off employees, and / or a very public notice to the whole (startup) world. I'm pretty sure everyone involved would be exhausted in every way. It would nice if there were people who could ease the pain. It's probably not something you conquer the world with, but it would make this place suck just a little less (maybe as a non-profit).
Edit: Can anyone suggest alternatives?
I am floored that someone actually invested in this idea, much less an actual board of directors.
"We thought hard about the right label for our company, which would best convey our mission to the people in the industry. Now, I am very happy to say we came to a great final name. The idea of The Beginning and The End, expressed in a symmetrical bigram joined by a familiar and well-established TLD is just what conveys best the sense of our commitment to bring an information service that strives to stay in touch with the most recent failures on the startup scene, help the novice founders make the best informed decisions and thus contribute our little bit into making the world a better place." - CEO
[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/name.html
I've been a Shutdownify client as a CEO of many companies, and I must say it was a joy to shut down my companies using Shutdownify!
It didn't help that they rewrote their tech stack from Ruby to Node even as they were trying to find customers. In the end, the user doesn't care what it's built with.
craziness… I don't believe it.
Let alone the user who is facing a shutdown of their business.
This kind of start up irks mes as a sign that we have really reached the top of the bubble. Really sell your SF real estate now. Its is going to crash. It is such a waste of developer talent to put effort into hapless startups like this. I would like to know which fools invested in this so I can avoid taking their investment too.
</ Look someone has to take it seriously ;-D >
Edit: Damn this backfired. The downvoterz haz spoken!