[HN Gopher] Friday.app is shutting down
___________________________________________________________________
Friday.app is shutting down
Author : Dangeranger
Score : 88 points
Date : 2022-04-06 15:39 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (friday.app)
(TXT) w3m dump (friday.app)
| danpalmer wrote:
| Wow I'm sad I never found this while working at my previous
| company. I've wanted a lot of what this provides, and considered
| building it myself.
|
| I wonder if the emphasis on task management is a contributing
| factor in it not taking off. Anecdotally, most places have a task
| management system already, switching systems is a heavy cost, and
| building a good one is actually a ton of work in the long term.
|
| I'd be interested to see an app that focuses more on the culture
| aspects here - kudos, user profiles, events, search. Most
| companies don't have solutions for these, and bringing them into
| one place could be valuable.
| lukethomas wrote:
| Hey, I'm the founder. We worked really hard to not position
| ourselves as a task management tool, but instead, a tool that
| integrates with existing systems.
|
| Task management is extremely competitive and we didn't want to
| play in the space. With that being said, we viewed our job as
| an interface to "glue" the work together, no matter the source.
| gunapologist99 wrote:
| > we viewed our job as an interface to "glue" the work
| together, no matter the source.
|
| Glue and integrations with third-party systems are important,
| for sure, but were there any other jobs that customers were
| expecting more of, rather than this one?
| eatonphil wrote:
| Happened to randomly stumble on their launch post/Show HN [0]
| from two years ago.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22502308
| lukethomas wrote:
| I originally called it "Friday Feedback" - you will probably
| see a launch post ~6 years ago with a search for that :)
| productceo wrote:
| Seems like they had a good attempt, and the team learnt a
| valuable lessin on the importance of validating the business (not
| just the product) ASAP.
|
| I wish them luck on their next enterprises!
| [deleted]
| m_ke wrote:
| How much longer will people continue trusting venture backed
| startups that are almost guaranteed to go belly up within 24
| months?
|
| Instead of building on all of this work we keep blowing it up and
| reinventing things because VCs only want unicorn outcomes. As an
| example, YC startup graveyard could be full of flowers if these
| projects were open source and we had a better user driven funding
| model to keep them going after the business folds.
| softwarebeware wrote:
| Why not? As long as we're not locked in, if a product is good
| and we're early adopters we're getting the benefits from it
| that other people who are afraid to dip their toes in the water
| aren't getting.
| bin_bash wrote:
| I think the question we need to ask ourselves is if they would
| exist without VC in the first place. A bunch of bootstrapped
| startups able to eek out a living through a relatively small
| number of subscriptions sounds wonderful, but is it realistic?
| dbbk wrote:
| Of course it is. Software has a very high margin. You could
| get by with a skeleton staff, and make a nice profit.
| sokoloff wrote:
| "Relatively small number of subscriptions" may not even pay
| for a skeleton staff, let alone leave a nice profit
| afterward.
| nostrebored wrote:
| Some software. Do you think companies catering to public
| sector or the enterprise are high margin in the first few
| years?
|
| Consumer apps can often get away with scaling ARR and slow
| incremental growth, but many of these are only feasible due
| to the existence of VC backed SaaS.
| bin_bash wrote:
| It also has a high start up cost--meaning the owners would
| have to be able to support themselves, their families, and
| pay for whatever costs the company needs until people are
| willing to pay for the software. That is, if such a day
| ever comes.
| dbbk wrote:
| Not necessarily, you can take another job to pay the
| bills. Or if you're in the UK we have dedicated benefits
| schemes to fund people starting a business.
| nostrebored wrote:
| I'm planning on starting a company within the next few years.
| I would not do it if VC money weren't on the table. I have a
| family, bills to pay, exactly $0 in generational wealth, but
| I'm well paid.
|
| I do not have the excess capital to throw at working on
| problems at the scale that I want to or in the segments that
| I'm interested in. Any money that I spent to work on these
| companies would be gambling with the future financial
| stability I can provide for my son. Providing him with the
| safety net necessary to pursue atypical career paths or
| interests is one of my top priorities.
|
| VC funding is the only way that starting a company is
| possible for me. The existence of VC funding is the only
| reason I'm even ideating about these large problems. It's an
| equalizer that puts those of us without the same set of
| options at a level playing field.
| m_ke wrote:
| There could be other financing options that wouldn't hinge
| on astronomic outcomes to be sustainable. We could have
| crowdfunded incubators where potential customers provide
| seed capital and sign on to sponsor the project, and imho
| it would align incentives a lot better than "maximizing
| shareholder value" with bait and switch business models.
| mountainofdeath wrote:
| The VC model requires continuous unicorns with clean exits in a
| sea of misses to be able to hit the typical 30% IRR they
| promise to pension funds, endowments, Bill Gates and Co, etc.
| Lifestyle businesses are actively avoided for this reason.
|
| It's one if the reasons I avoid working for bootstrapped
| startups or startups with no-name VCs.
| m_ke wrote:
| Yes continuous stream of pump and dumps that get marked up at
| every round and never make a profit but make early
| shareholders rich.
| mountainofdeath wrote:
| Ideally no and traditionally it wasn't. VC was originally
| intended for big, high-risk, high-reward technical ideas
| like semiconductors (Intel, Nvidia), widespread software
| e.g. Google, medical devices, biotech, etc. In general,
| taking a novel approach to something or doing something
| totally new.
|
| Only in recent times did pumping and dumping yet another
| B2B SaaS app become in vogue and usually by not tier-one
| funds. There is a reason the big, famous funds are
| oversubscribed and limited to big, famous institutional
| investors.**
|
| ** The same applies to other funds e.g. Hedge Funds. Only
| the very top consistently perform anywhere near their
| promises and the rest are ways for groups to try to get
| their foot in the door.
| m_ke wrote:
| Precisely "was".
|
| Top tier firms are actually the ones most guilty of it
| these days. They raise huge funds (thanks to Softbank)
| and attempt to buy their way into monopoly positions by
| selling dollars for 50 cents, manufacturing growth and
| then dumping the companies on the public market (these
| days through SPACs). Public markets are no different than
| private, it's the same group of individuals just further
| down the chain, with the same incentives to push up
| valuations knowing that stonks can only go up and when
| things go bad we'll be on the hook to rescue them, or if
| things are not catastrophic they'll just write off the
| losses or let main street investors on robinhood catch
| the falling knife.
| triyambakam wrote:
| > It's one if the reasons I avoid working for bootstrapped
| startups
|
| I don't understand how that follows from the first statement.
| Can you explain?
| nradov wrote:
| More open source contributions are always good, but they don't
| accomplish much in the case of SaaS offerings. Ultimately
| someone has to pay to run the servers.
| m_ke wrote:
| Sure, but 90% of software doesn't need to be cloud based and
| with docker and k8s it would be hard to distribute an app
| like friday for users to self host. AWS and GCP could be a
| cloud app platform where each enterprise could run all of
| their apps on a single cluster instead of paying for 20
| different SaaS offerings running on different clusters.
| lpolovets wrote:
| Isn't this a risk with apps in general, not just VC backed
| ones? I skimmed the blog post and it sounds like they had a
| hard time monetizing the product. That could happen with a
| bootstrapped project too: someone builds something cool in
| their spare time, launches it, gets enough users to spend more
| time on it for a while, then realizes it's too hard to monetize
| or they want to work on something else or whatever and shuts
| the project down.
| jasonnchann wrote:
| Never understood why you wouldn't, at the minimum, open source
| it if you're shutting the doors
| lukethomas wrote:
| I am considering it. I have a fiduciary duty to try to fetch
| a fair value for the assets, but if no one wants the
| codebase, I'd consider opening it up. Still TBD as I just
| announced this a couple days ago :)
| jasonnchann wrote:
| That makes sense. I was mainly wondering for old/past
| companies that don't end up selling their code base versus
| for Friday specifically. But maybe thats the answer, most
| companies end up selling their codebase and it does get
| reused. Good luck on everything!
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| for open sourcing you have to be careful about licenses.
|
| As long as you are not "distributing" it is absolutely fine
| to mix GPLv2, Apache License and proprietary code you got
| from some vendor all together. But as soon as you distribute
| this, it becomes messy.
|
| And then come all the question on technical integrations, ego
| ("ugly code!!"), ...
| bin_bash wrote:
| It'd be pretty hard to litigate against a non-existent
| company.
| pininja wrote:
| I'm a huge advocate of this, and have seen it play out well
| with the Linux Foundation and Mapzen. In this case, their
| employees seemed to be very thoughtful about how their
| projects could live on and be useful beyond the company
| lifecycle.
|
| Aside from the code getting a license and legal audit,
| finding a trademark sponsor was important to them too so that
| someone doesn't come along and re-commercialize their free
| and open work under the old brand.
|
| On the flip side, this process is a lot of extra work to do
| in a very busy and risky time for a buisness. Efforts to open
| source may fail and I understand when people in charge choose
| to spend their time prioritizing their employee's needs
| first, technology second. I can understand why the open
| source priority isn't practical if the company doesn't plan
| for this possibility ahead of time.
| epolanski wrote:
| > How much longer will people continue trusting venture backed
| startups that are almost guaranteed to go belly up within 24
| months?
|
| A lot.
|
| We are raising generations that hail hashes representing urls
| to some origin server hosting a picture of a stylized horse
| (till the origin server doesn't shut down or changes the
| resource) over real estate, traditional stocks or even just
| luxury or anything you can touch or use.
|
| We hail as heroes few dozens of crazy dudes putting all their
| life savings into meme stocks and picture them as heroes
| fighting against "the system".
|
| We hail as heroes controversial entrepeneurs, generally
| sociopaths full of themselves, rather than hard working common
| people.
|
| We are creating generations of ever more connected but lonely
| individuals desperately trying to find their place in the
| world, and somehow, we tell them that money is the answer for
| finding that place and purpose.
|
| There is no shortage of people desperate for "making it" with
| ease and willing to take huge risks.
|
| Go on reddits or boards related to personal finance, risky
| crypto speculation and meme stocks are discussed more than
| taxes, education investments or simple funds.
|
| I think VC craziness is going to increase _a lot_ and spread to
| places and countries where it wasn 't the norm, that's up to
| you to decide whether it's good or not.
| frankthedog wrote:
| Who is we? I sure don't. The vocal minority that lionizes
| this behavior is just that, a minority.
| epolanski wrote:
| Our society, especially in western cultures.
| dag11 wrote:
| Who do we trust for longevity? On the other end of the spectrum
| is Google which also shutters many (most?) of their products
| after 24-48 months.
| [deleted]
| m_ke wrote:
| Blender, Linux, VLC, Rails, Django, Numpy, etc
|
| There's really no reason why all of this software needs to be
| cloud based, other than vendor lock in. For collaboration
| software we should have a way to self host or pay for managed
| hosts.
| alexose wrote:
| I would _love_ to see startups adopt a "poison pill" clause
| that automatically switches their code over to the MIT license
| the moment a company goes under.
|
| The bigger risk however isn't just that a company goes poof,
| but that the IP gets purchased for pennies on the dollar by
| some other company. This is an escape hatch that I don't think
| many investors would give up willingly.
| rsstack wrote:
| Code escrow and SaaS escrow are both guarantees that exist.
| Larger customers can negotiate it if they aren't sure what
| will be the future of the company. Redis (back when they were
| called RedisLabs) used to offer that for their proprietary
| components several years ago, although in hindsight it
| clearly wasn't needed in their case.
| ezekg wrote:
| Sounds like a cool startup idea -- a company like
| codekeeper.co but for documenting and open sourcing a product
| given they go poof. All the legalese that would entail and
| integration with source control included, of course.
| m_ke wrote:
| Yes, that's definitely an issue with my company. We serve a
| pretty small niche and provide services to a few well funded
| competitors, I've gotten a few acquisition offers that would
| have really hurt my other customers if the deal went through.
|
| Since it's a core feature but not a differentiator for their
| businesses I'd love to just make all of it open source and
| charge all of them to keep maintaining it but there's not an
| easy way to do that currently without devaluating it.
| duxup wrote:
| Developers like to try new things.
|
| People generally don't want to pay for things / fund things
| themselves.
|
| For now on the internet this is the way, and IMO we as the
| users of the internet are somewhat the cause too.
| softwarebeware wrote:
| Sorry to see this. In 2004, I worked for a major national non-
| profit in the US. We built our own internal web portal that is
| essentially what Friday is. Since then, I've seen a lot more
| interest in this space. Microsoft SharePoint is one of the main
| ones but, I think, only because it's from Microsoft and
| integrates well with Windows networks. From a product standpoint,
| SharePoint is just not very good.
|
| Someone is going to come in and own this space one day for sure.
| The need is always there.
| palerdot wrote:
| How ironic ... He interviewed at Failory[0] in successful venture
| section. In just 2 years, the product will be moved to the
| mainstream failed startup section of the website.
|
| [0] - https://www.failory.com/interview/friday
| SashaSirotkin wrote:
| It's not just "2 years". Two years is a really long time for a
| young startup given they effectively operate using dog years
| Eighth wrote:
| I'm suprised they're shutting down because of a lack of a
| buyer/investor rather than making it and keeping it as a
| successful business. Are the goals these days for a big buy out?
| boffinism wrote:
| The subtext is: it wasn't a successful business, so the only
| option for survival was to try to find a buyer/investor to fund
| it on the promise of future success
| BaseballPhysics wrote:
| Once you take seed funding you're locked into a raise and re-
| raise treadmill until you grow sufficiently to find an exit.
| VCs/seed shops aren't there to help you build a lifestyle
| business. They're trying to either fail fast or get a 10x
| multiple and move on, which means either an IPO or (far more
| likely these days) an acquisition.
| nerdponx wrote:
| Maybe I'm a rarity in this, but I actually _prefer_ paying
| for services that are not VC funded. That way I feel like I
| am less likely to have the rug pulled out from under me.
| triyambakam wrote:
| Geckoboard is an interesting opposite example of this. They
| took a seed round more than ten years ago and have been
| slowly and steadily maintaining the business, resisting
| further rounds. I don't know their finances but they seem to
| continue to be doing well.
| BaseballPhysics wrote:
| And that does happen occasionally, but they're rare and it
| doesn't go on forever.
|
| Bandcamp was similarly private for 15 years after taking a
| few rounds of funding, but they eventually got acquired,
| and I guarantee you that's because those investors pushed
| for an exit while the projected future revenues of the
| company justified a higher valuation.
|
| I myself worked for a company that was private for 12 years
| after seed funding and five rounds of VC capital. But
| eventually we were pushed into a (poorly conceived)
| acquisition.
|
| The merry-go-round always stops. It's just a matter of
| time.
| paxys wrote:
| Quite a week for popular startups with millions in funding and
| general buzz shutting down overnight.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| I don't think it's fair to include this one with the other
| "growth & engagement" bullshit we typically see go belly up.
|
| This company only raised a _reasonable_ amount of money (450k
| according to https://www.failory.com/interview/friday) and had
| a _real_ product people were paying for.
| paxys wrote:
| It raised $2.1 million in November 2020
| (https://techcrunch.com/2020/11/23/friday-app-a-remote-
| work-t...), so the number is at least $2.5M if not higher.
| lukethomas wrote:
| We raised a total of $2.6m, so nothing too crazy in today's
| market.
| paxys wrote:
| I'm curious - why couldn't you raise more? Like you said,
| a couple million is nothing in today's market. You have a
| real product, real users. Why did no one give you another
| round of funding?
| mdoms wrote:
| It's a shame so many tech companies think they need to be always
| "seeking investment". I don't see any reason this couldn't have
| been a nice little lifestyle business, but no, we need to feed
| the investors with boundless growth.
| encoderer wrote:
| There's an alternate reality where the founder didn't raise money
| and kept the autonomy to nurture the product. Not every product
| can be bootstrapped but from a glance this one could be (and
| was!)
|
| Raising money turns a marathon into a sprint.
| sosodev wrote:
| Yeah, this is sad because it sounds like Friday was doing
| _something_ right. It really seems like they could have had
| sustainable growth.
| lukethomas wrote:
| I bootstrapped the company for years before raising. I raised
| because I felt that I had to go after the bigger vision, which
| required resources ($$).
|
| In short, I wanted to accelerate the pace of learning, because
| if I didn't, I would always kick myself for not stepping on the
| gas pedal.
|
| I don't regret my decision either TBH.
| mhitza wrote:
| If you're shutting it down, why not offer the source code
| under an OSS license for your users to be able to migrate to
| self hosted?
| paxys wrote:
| Even if the founder wants to do that, it would involve
| every single investor signing off on it, which seems like
| an uphill battle.
| nicoburns wrote:
| > Even if the founder wants to do that, it would involve
| every single investor signing off on it, which seems like
| an uphill battle.
|
| Would it? Don't owners of companies general cede day-to-
| day business decisions to those running the company (i.e.
| the CEO)?
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| The issue isn't who gets to make "day-to-day business
| decisions" (i'm not sure how you characterize licensing
| source code as open source as such, but it doens't
| matter).
|
| The issue is that shareholders literally own the property
| owned by the company, that's what it means to be a
| shareholder. Including intellectual property.
|
| Announcing you are shutting down a company, and then,
| without board approval, the CEO giving away what assets
| remain... is super sketchy and probably illegal, probably
| stealing from the shareholders (or even more likely other
| creditors, if they exist), who would probably like to
| partially recoup their losses from sales of any remaining
| assets. What those assets are you are giving away are,
| say, a fleet of cars, or the intellectual property of
| source code, legally the same.
|
| Imagine if a car service company announced it was
| shutting down, and then gave away all it's cars, instead
| of selling them in an orderly fashion and distributing
| profits to anyone who was owed money, including creditors
| and shareholders.
|
| Given that with a company going out of business a lot of
| people are going to be losing money and wanting to get
| what they can out of any assets... the time to release as
| open source is really before you go out of business.
| paxys wrote:
| Well giving away all company IP for free isn't a "day-to-
| day business decision". If the company is shutting down
| the assets go to the investors, and they can choose what
| to do with it.
| [deleted]
| kodah wrote:
| Someone in the business likely is in-scope for licensing
| decisions and on the facade this sort of decision probably
| looks noble and altruistic. To answer your question, "is it
| possible" - yes.
|
| Ethically, however, it doesn't really check out for me. If
| the software is a core part of your business and the (or
| one of the) primary reasons an investor has joined your
| business then it's at the very least a bait and switch to
| make such a decision without their involvement. To a big VC
| or private equity firm this may infuriate some but have
| little monetary impact; at a much smaller firm this could
| be highly damaging.
|
| I'm also fairly certain that whatever harm comes from this
| decision would put the CEO in personal liability,
| potentially all the way up the decision chain.
| Kiro wrote:
| I get the same question every time I shut down something.
| No, I don't want people to see my embarrassing spaghetti
| code. With that said, I haven't shut down any critical
| products so it has been more like "would be nice if you
| made it open source" but my point is that there are many
| non-obvious reasons not to open source something.
|
| Another is that I've randomly put credentials in the source
| code that I don't want leaked (again, my code is an ugly
| mess full of shortcuts and hacks). Yet another is that it
| would be impossible for someone to host themselves because
| I don't even understand it myself.
| interactivecode wrote:
| Agree, I think the fear of someone finding a
| vulnerability and the original author being held
| accountable is high enough for almost nobody to open
| source their code.
| onelovetwo wrote:
| That's a terrible way to think and oddly an excuse I hear
| a lot. If that's the case, there would be no OSS
| software, every OSS starts off crappy and full of bugs
| and usually not even close to finished.
|
| The goal of OSS is not to show off your skills as some
| elite programmer.
| cjaybo wrote:
| > every OSS starts off crappy and full of bugs and
| usually not even close to finished.
|
| I think the quality/bugginess isn't as much of a factor
| as the fact that the codebase was not written with the
| intention of becoming OSS. Things like lack of
| documentation, hard-coded secrets, inflexible
| hosting/deployment, etc. are difficult to account for
| after the fact. And if you ignore these things and just
| "throw code over the wall", then virtually no one will
| even look at your code, let alone use it. Kind of a waste
| of time just to indulge a few self-righteous commenters
| on some message board, if you ask me.
|
| A lot of OSS software was written with the intention of
| being open-sourced, so many of the things that make open-
| sourcing a previously-closed repo difficult are
| considered upfront.
| Kiro wrote:
| Easy to say, harder to do. I get anxiety just thinking
| about it.
|
| What's the goal? You make it sound like I have an
| obligation to do it for some utilitarian reasons, while
| in reality maybe one or two previous customers would use
| it while migrating to something else. It's crap software
| with much better OSS alternatives already.
|
| It either dies with me or dies as an abandoned repo I
| need to be ashamed of.
| MrMan wrote:
| I am just jumping in not to pressure you specifically to
| dump the source but in my experience in quant finance and
| music software development (hobby), I see kind of a
| tragedy of the commons especially in finance. If more
| people made their source available upon winding down a
| project it would drive down costs in the entire industry
| and indeed the whole tech ecosystem.
|
| Reimplementation saps alot of productivity from the
| economy.
| someone7x wrote:
| My dude, who is ashamed of open source repo?
| mhitza wrote:
| I get your point, because I'm "baking" some code I would
| like to open source one day and cleanups are in order.
|
| However, when you're closing shop dumping the code out
| there for others to figure out how to run, even if you
| can't help them set up an env from scratch still helps. I
| also think we need more spaghetti code out there, would
| help teach new developers how to maintain and refactor
| "legacy" code.
|
| The credentials in source code thing, I thought by this
| time would have been a "solved" issue, but I guess some
| people still yolo it :). Credentials in source code, are
| the equivalent of password on post it notes ;)
| danenania wrote:
| Shameless plug: if anyone needs to get credentials out of
| their code, EnvKey[1] makes it really easy (disclaimer--
| I'm the founder.) We just launched our v2, which includes
| a free cloud tier for up to 7 users, or you can self-host
| it. Give it a try and sleep better at night :)
|
| 1 - https://envkey.com
| vineyardmike wrote:
| > Credentials in source code, are the equivalent of
| password on post it notes ;)
|
| While not the best security, post it notes are immune to
| hacking and really hard to leak without a home intrusion.
|
| Credentials in source that won't be shared is a pretty
| efficient hack. Often it happens by mistake - eg. when
| you hard-code that credential into a bash script during
| testing when you're trying to curl a new API and then
| push it by mistake after a coworker asks for you to share
| your progress on a new branch for review.
| franga2000 wrote:
| If the company publishes the code, then closes, what's
| the harm? Any hard-coded creds would be invalid and any
| license violations wouldn't matter because there would be
| no company.
|
| I'd love to hear about these "non-obvious" reasons,
| because I can't say "I'm embarrassed by my code" sounds
| like a good excuse after convincing people to move to
| your platform, charging them a subscription for it, then
| kicking them off with only 60 days notice.
|
| And "I don't think others could figure out how to host
| it" isn't a reason not to release. It costs nothing but a
| pretty insignificant amount of time to publish it, so
| even if it's "impossible" to re-host (and history would
| say it's not), I really don't see a reason not to let
| people try.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| A software developer who is trying to sell products to
| businesses, software on which those businesses would
| rely, admits to creating an "ugly mess" of "spaghetti
| code ... full of shortcuts and hacks" and to embedding
| security credentials in the SCM.
|
| I wish you no ill will, but goodness, talk about an anti-
| ad for your products.
|
| Creds should be outside the SCM, and there are varying
| levels of "best practice" - vaults, environment variables
| of CI servers, text files with strict permissions
| _outside_ the SCM, etc.
| Kiro wrote:
| You would be surprised how many businesses run on equally
| bad or worse code. At least I'm honest about it.
|
| Your tips are true but not very helpful. I know it's bad
| or I wouldn't call it an ugly mess. I have better
| practices nowadays regarding credentials but all my
| projects always spiral out of control some way or
| another. If it's not this it's something else but I'm
| never proud of my code.
| sharps_xp wrote:
| It isn't unprecedented to ask the investors to write off
| their investments. Would it be too late to revert back to a
| private business?
| carimura wrote:
| It's already private, I presume you mean some form of
| restructuring the cap table so the founders/team have fresh
| ownership to work with.
|
| A noble thought, but then what? skeleton crew the business
| at a snails pace while still being unclear how to actually
| make money?
| simulate-me wrote:
| Gumroad successfully negotiated something with its
| investors and still exists and is profitable.
| carimura wrote:
| there are certainly numerous success stories. i have
| friends who "recapped" and went on to be quite
| financially successful, but that is likely the exception,
| not the rule.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| His story on https://www.failory.com/interview/friday
| suggests it's making 10-25k MRR. If he can run it on
| autopilot with just occasional bugfixes and support
| queries, he's still got a very nice "lifestyle business"
| that will probably keep yielding for a couple years.
| altdataseller wrote:
| 25K MRR is enough to support a team of maybe 1-2 people,
| which probably isn't enough to answer all their customer
| queries, keep the infrastructure up and running and
| continue marketing efforts to ensure revenue at least
| doesn't go down year to year.
| birken wrote:
| I think your idea fails for at least a couple key
| reasons. First, a lot of customers will probably migrate
| to competitor if they know the product isn't in active
| development anymore, so the MRR will likely drop over
| time. Second, investors are not going to just give up
| their equity while the owner directly profits off their
| investment, there would have to be some type of buy-back,
| and the owner probably doesn't have that kind of money.
| ttty wrote:
| bspear wrote:
| Were you profitable before you raised? Just curious if you
| wanted a bigger outcome or the smaller scale wasn't
| sustainable either
| [deleted]
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| Apt thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30925205
| satvikpendem wrote:
| As someone in the productivity space [0], it's hard to build a
| sticky enough product since there's a lot of churn.
|
| There have been many apps that have shut down in just the last
| few years, such as this and Woven, that I wonder if the money is
| not in such consumer (or even prosumer) apps like these and
| instead is in firmly B2B territory, where you can charge at least
| $100 a month, a market that would be a lot more sustainable user
| base than the fickle hands of B2C.
|
| [0] https://getartemis.app (my app)
| nerdponx wrote:
| Some unsolicited feedback: integrating my todo list with my
| calendar is something I would love.
|
| However I have no idea what Artemis actually is or does based
| on the homepage.
|
| Does it only work with Google, or can I bring my own CalDAV? Is
| it an app, or a website? Does it cost anything? What does
| "signing up" actually entail? Is "forgetting to add breaks"
| some pain point I have that I didn't realize I had?
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Thanks, the landing page is pretty old now, I'm working on a
| mobile app right now that is like a time tracker integrated
| with your to do list items, and eventually it'll integrate
| with your calendar, it'll cost some X dollars a month, where
| X < 20, not sure on pricing just yet.
|
| But to be honest, I don't think consumers will pay much for
| subscription software, while businesses will. I'm thinking of
| pivoting to B2B, a calendar API product that other companies
| can integrate into, something like that.
| maxclark wrote:
| Failure is hard, it sucks, I'm sorry you ended up here
|
| Kudos to the team for doing this the best way possible. Making a
| public announcement, refunding money, providing ample time to
| migrate is amazing.
|
| Keep your heads up
| lukethomas wrote:
| Thank you. Just trying to do the right thing given the
| circumstances.
| rileyphone wrote:
| Unfortunate, I still think forum software for running companies
| is a good idea. I suppose https://threads.com/ is the main
| product left there - I can't help but think their pricing model
| makes a lot more sense than Friday's.
| hyperionplays wrote:
| Damn, threads looks cool..
|
| I wonder if there's an opensource version in the wild.
| v1l wrote:
| Looks interesting. Is it popular?
| angryasian wrote:
| What happens to all the assets in this case ? Is it possible to
| sell it on like flippa ?
| arberx wrote:
| Fast, now Friday. Expect to see a lot more of this.
|
| Funding is getting tight. If you're not profitable or don't have
| a plan to be soon, it will be tough.
| filmgirlcw wrote:
| >Funding is getting tight. If you're not profitable or don't
| have a plan to be soon, it will be tough.
|
| Funding is NOT tight -- it just doesn't last forever and
| investors eventually want returns.
|
| With Fast, they raised $130m, had 400 employees, a run rate of
| $10m a month and made a whopping $600k in revenue. The
| staggering level of incompetence from every single person not
| just on that executive team, but of the firms who invested in
| Fast, is something we haven't seen in years.
|
| Friday seems to be quite different. They did $2.3m in seed
| based on Crunchbase and that was in 2020 and never managed to
| find product market fit. That's a completely different problem
| than simply not being profitable.
| arberx wrote:
| Current market dynamics dictated the death of these startups.
| If this was last year, they would have gotten funding to
| survive.
|
| Time will tell, but not looking great for anyone trying to
| raise rn.
| filmgirlcw wrote:
| >Current market dynamics dictated the death of these
| startups. If this was last year, they would have gotten
| funding to survive.
|
| Fast would not have received the funding to survive (if it
| received any additional funding it would have been
| predicated on probably cutting staff at least 60% if not
| more).
|
| People are literally raising every single day. Funding
| might not be at the peak frothy levels it has been at
| before, but these are hardly bear times right now.
| ghostbrainalpha wrote:
| They had an almost perfect name. I'm sure we will hear from the
| founder again on Hacker News.
| xmlninja wrote:
| Friday.app, run over by monday.com
| lukethomas wrote:
| Hey there, I'm the founder. Happy to answer any questions people
| have. This was a decision I didn't take lightly.
| eatonphil wrote:
| What's next?
| nathancahill wrote:
| I'd love to hear your response to this comment:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30933873
| altdataseller wrote:
| What was the ARR at its peak?
| Dangeranger wrote:
| You mentioned in your post that your primary reason for
| shutting down was that you didn't find sufficient evidence that
| your product/service was meeting the needs of your users. Was
| there also pressure from investors to shut down due to this
| lack of evidence, or was this a personal decision made based on
| your principles?
|
| Thank you for your consideration.
| lukethomas wrote:
| I made the decision after a lot of reflection. We still had
| ~6 months of runway so I could have spent more time
| "pivoting" around.
|
| The issue was that what I was hearing from prospects,
| customers, users signaled a bigger issue that could not be
| solved with a product tweak or two.
|
| At the end of the day, I felt like the story I would need to
| tell a future investor (and new/existing employees) would
| increasingly become disconnected from the reality I was
| experiencing talking to customers/users.
|
| I didn't feel at peace about it at all. I considered it to be
| a form of lying.
| pedalpete wrote:
| This is a great answer, I felt the same way about my
| previous start-up Ayvri.com We make enough to cover our
| costs, so I've kept it going for the last 2 years.
|
| As I kept looking for new ways for us to grow, and what
| pivots might work, one of our existing investors said to me
| [paraphasing] "we'll invest more if you know what to do
| with it, but I [the investor] think you should start
| thinking about what your next thing is. We'll invest in
| that, but there comes a time you need to move on".
|
| That chat was really impactful, they were happy to see us
| launch a product, get customers, and try to build something
| really amazing (and we kinda did).
|
| The same team that created Ayvri (most of us) have come
| back together to create https://soundmind.co - we haven't
| taken investment yet, but the same investors are ready to
| back us when we do.
|
| Did you have that kind of support from your investors
| @Lukethomas?
|
| I think many of us are so scared of letting our investors
| down, but I am super happy with the character of our
| investors, who supported us in the best way possible.
| carimura wrote:
| much respect. those are hard feelings to deal with
| especially given you had users, customers, investors, and a
| team to think about as well, none of which you can easily
| and cleanly ask for advice on this matter.
| mkmk wrote:
| What are some of the biggest lessons you learned from this
| experience? What do you feel like you did right, and what would
| you do differently?
| lukethomas wrote:
| I knew we needed to build a suite of tooling, as our goal was
| to be a "hub" for the most important stuff at work. In
| retrospect, we built too much product.
|
| If I start another company, I will spend all my time focused
| on solving a very big pain-point with a few simple product.
|
| With Friday, I wanted to keep the product simple, but the
| people we talked to always were talking about the "yet
| another tool problem" - so there was a desire to consolidate.
| How I interpreted this was that we needed to build the
| "suite" vs. spending all our time on one feature.
|
| I could go on and on about what I would do differently, but
| I'm thankful for the opportunity and have learned a lot that
| will (hopefully) make me more effective in the future :)
| pathartl wrote:
| > In retrospect, we built too much product.
|
| This answer is so generic, but so apt. Everyone can throw
| around phrases like KISS or MVP or try to implement
| methodology like agile, but it's so hard to just identify
| _what_ you want (or need) to build.
|
| We're looking at a major revamp/rewrite/refactor of our
| main product that previously had been built with the idea
| of being able to solve every problem our customers face.
| This decrepit, aging codebase has so many bandaid fixes for
| every conceivable "what if" scenario that it's just become
| unmaintainable.
| nerdponx wrote:
| Maybe the "yet another tool problem" can be addressed by
| making your tool easy to integrate with other tools, rather
| than trying to build a big all-in-one suite.
| lukethomas wrote:
| This was precisely our approach, but we built our own
| features for the "gaps" that we believed existed in the
| other products.
|
| If an existing app was doing a decent job, we didn't want
| to compete with them. The issue is that we ended up
| arriving in this "dead-zone" where we didn't replace an
| existing tool and pull budget from an existing category
| of tooling.
| mdip wrote:
| It depends on if their target audience was small
| companies or enterprises. It may have made a difference,
| but it wouldn't have changed much for Enterprise
| customers. At BigCo (a global telecom[0]), it was much
| easier to add business from a vendor that we already had
| a relationship with than it was to purchase anything from
| anyone we didn't. It was also, of course, much easier to
| buy software/SaaS from one of the existing, boring,
| established vendors than lesser known/smaller ones. There
| was a mess of "Purchasing" involvement, legal, and
| everything else just to set things up so we could make
| the purchase. I don't know what Friday was for (had never
| heard of it until, today), but it sounded like it was
| something that would be company-wide, probably, so
| sneaking it in with an "expense card" isn't likely going
| to be defensible.
|
| Then there's the "easy to integrate" side. _Expect_ it to
| have to pass security reviews if it 's SaaS of any kind
| and will touch any of our IP[1], and particularly
| detailed ones if it's _very_ easy to "integrate with."
|
| Azure AD Login was easy for us at "BigCo", but tied up
| several days of more than one grumpy security
| architecture team member's time with a variety of pen-
| tests that are required before they'll grant approval for
| it in our domain. That goes up exponentially to the
| impossible pretty quickly if it wants permissions to
| access things on our end via OAuth grants; even things
| that are typical (profile photo).
|
| IT Architecture might get involved if there would be a
| need to make sure it worked with our systems, minimally
| to set up monitoring for it if we're making it available
| to a large amount of staff because if it goes down, we'll
| get a million calls into our 4-6 person (state-side by
| contractual/security requirements) Help Desk over
| something we can't do anything about and we're going to
| make sure we have a way to react to it when that happens.
| Someone's going to have to learn how to do any
| administrative/integration requirements, because
| configuration changes, we merge with companies somewhat
| frequently, and someone's going to have to make sure they
| know how to set it all back up, correctly, later -- just
| in case -- even when it doesn't make sense. Likely, BigCo
| want it to be used, so someone's going to have to write
| copy for an article for the company landing page
| explaining what it is, how it works and what problem it
| solves. There'll be other activities related to this when
| adoption doesn't take off. IT will have to dedicate some
| time to tracking usage to make sure we're getting ROI on
| it when the quarterlies come around and they have to
| justify every recurring expense, including the ones
| outside of the sticker price, all over again, and it's
| easy to trim off the add-on. Plus, they're often the ones
| who take the budget hit in the first place.
|
| Legal/HR/The Business(tm) might get involved if employees
| can communicate, uninhibited, through it -- just like
| they do with E-Mail while they apply a flobbidy-jillion
| set of restrictions/disclaimers bits of nonsense around.
| We were not a Defense Contractor, we were just big,
| spread out and had a lot of employees. At scale, you end
| up with increasingly many who lack common sense, and a
| small fraction who still need to be warned about Nigerian
| Prince scams when one slips through. In a strange
| alteration of Rule 34, someone will upload porn to it or
| store porn on it if it is possible to store things on it.
| For the person who _wants_ the product, it 's going to be
| requiring phone calls, follow-ups, and general "going to
| bat for the vendor's product" against a hurricane-force
| headwind.
|
| In fact, an add-on might be less likely to be purchased
| -- by BigCo, anyway -- because it doesn't do enough to
| pass the "Why do we need to tie up all of these people to
| bring this easy-to-integrate product into our environment
| when they can just use (some terrible excuse for a thing
| by comparison)?" The "we don't need that bad enough"
| answer is usually the case for Add Ons, and having a
| number of ancillary capabilities to distract with
| sometimes makes it more attractive to "the business" side
| of the above groups, which has the ability, often, to
| over-ride all of the rest of the "No"s going around.
|
| At BigCo, an add-on requiring anything that the "good
| enough to somewhat OK" solution/solutions we _already
| have_ kind-of sort-of covers doesn 't stand much of a
| chance of being purchased. The one thing that _can_ get
| in the door is the _simple solution_ that solves a _big
| problem_ , especially if there's nothing else out there
| that much of any part of it from any of the big vendors.
| I spear-headed a small handful of those. It has to be
| _amazing_ and some reasonable combination of inexpensive,
| simple to maintain, highly available, non-critical if
| down (many, many things are unexpectedly critical).
|
| [0] I worked there about a decade for 17 years,
| incidentally, most of it remote at an organization that
| was notoriously against remote work ... basically against
| a major service we enabled and often provided for _other_
| businesses. I worked as a software developer in the
| architecture organization working primarily on security-
| focused projects (figure that out) and had to go through
| this process enough to make my soul die a little.
|
| [1] Basically, everything. At least, anything that would
| have a reason for the company to purchase it.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Is there any reason you can't just leave current the product
| as-is and keep running it on autopilot, with the only expenses
| being hosting and the occasional security vulnerability
| mitigations?
|
| You mention you had 100K users - I'm assuming those are paying
| users. Could they not keep using the product (especially if
| they've already onboarded)? Or are there significant ongoing
| costs beyond hosting?
| eps wrote:
| Perhaps they just want to move on?
|
| Not needing to tend to a project you no longer find
| interesting (or view as a failure) is _very_ liberating.
| kansface wrote:
| Products don't run themselves. Software must be upgraded
| because of security patches; if you don't keep up, after a
| while you can't because of skew. Customers require support
| when stuff goes wrong. Infrastructure changes from underneath
| you. SDKs change all the time. The law itself changes what is
| allowed or what is required.
| stickfigure wrote:
| > Products don't run themselves.
|
| That really depends on the product and how you built it.
| With platforms like Google App Engine or Heroku, there's no
| infrastructure to take care of and the only thing you have
| to patch/update is your own code. Customer support can be
| an issue, but some products are naturally self-service. Or
| cheap enough that there's no expectation of quality
| support.
|
| I do think you need to plan for this sort of thing if you
| want to be able to walk away (even for a short vacation).
| If your natural inclination is to start with k8s, you're
| going to need ongoing devops work in perpetuity.
| Kiro wrote:
| Depends on what kind of product. I've built an app that I
| haven't touched in many years with about $1M in monthly
| revenue (extremely low margin) and it's all good. Yes, it
| hasn't had any security patches in years and it's just a
| matter of time before it gets hacked but no big deal. If
| shit really hits the fan I will just shut it down. Not
| offering any support. Customers know I don't add anything.
| Not sure what law would affect anything.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > I've built an app that I haven't touched in many years
| with about $1M in monthly revenue (extremely low margin)
| and it's all good. Yes, it hasn't had any security
| patches in years
|
| You have a product bringing in $12 million per year
| (EDIT: I misread the profit remark originally, apologies
| to Kiro), and you can't be bothered to do basic security
| updates?
|
| > it's just a matter of time before it gets hacked but no
| big deal. If shit really hits the fan I will just shut it
| down.
|
| You're basically waiting to get hacked and your response
| plan is to just shut it down? _And turn off $12 million
| in annual revenue because you didn't feel like applying
| security updates?_
|
| Are you sure you mean $1 million per month in revenue?
| Because this doesn't make any sense at all.
|
| If this is true and accurate, you can at least see why
| this wouldn't apply to virtually anyone else running a
| high-profit software app, right? Especially not something
| like Friday.app which includes customer data.
| [deleted]
| semireg wrote:
| Think Roman numerals.
|
| 1M is thousand 1MM is million
|
| https://gettingpeopleright.com/resources/what-does-m-and-
| mm-...
| Kiro wrote:
| No, I'm talking about 1 million a month so that's on me
| for using it incorrectly then. Apologies.
| Kiro wrote:
| No, extremely low margin = miniscule profit compared to
| the revenue.
|
| Otherwise you're right. I simply can't be bothered and I
| don't even have access set up to the server on my current
| machine.
| cush wrote:
| Overhead. It's still a valid question. Maybe the CEO can
| answer.
| paxys wrote:
| > You mention you had 100K users - I'm assuming those are
| paying users
|
| Definitely not. A company of that size with 100K paying users
| (so like $10M+ ARR) would be considered wildly successful. In
| their case it was probably a tiny tiny fraction of that.
| jonnytran wrote:
| Did you try asking users to pay? I.e. tell your users,
| you're shutting down unless everyone starts paying. It
| could be Kickstarter style in that X number of users have
| to put in their payment information by some date, or you
| still shut down. That way, there's no chance that some
| people start paying, but you still shut down.
| gnicholas wrote:
| Great question. I wish Pebble had done this before
| shutting down. I would have paid double for my pre-
| ordered Time Steel 2.
|
| Wyze did this recently with their subscription, which
| they let you pay as little as $0 for. They forced anyone
| who didn't subscribe onto a lower tier, which only stored
| still images instead of videos in the cloud.
| dbbk wrote:
| Were you profitable?
| lukethomas wrote:
| Heck no. If we were profitable, I would have kept it up and
| running and reduced things to a skeleton crew.
| Dangeranger wrote:
| One of the things I appreciated about Friday was the
| information you all provided about remote work, and the book
| you wrote named "The Anywhere Operating System"[0].
|
| Would you be willing to keep the information you provided up as
| a statically hosted website so that the knowledge is not lost
| to the ether of the internet, accessible only via
| archive.org[1]?
|
| [0] https://friday.app/anywhere
|
| [1]
| https://web.archive.org/web/20220107125929/https://friday.ap...
| lukethomas wrote:
| Absolutely. I will 100% keep this up and running and freely
| available for all. It may be on my own personal website
| though.
| olah_1 wrote:
| Anecdotally, I had never heard of this app, but it is relevant
| to the area i work in (product comms, business operations).
|
| Was it difficult to advertise specifically to this audience?
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