Shutdownify is shutting down | Hacker News Reader

Shutdownify is shutting down

shutdownify.com

423 pointsjawns95 comments

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

They got VC funding‽

craziness… I don't believe it.

"It's the Web 2.0 version of fuckedcompany.com!"

> In the end, the user doesn't care what it's built with.

Let alone the user who is facing a shutdown of their business.

They had to transition to Node. The UI was really counter intuitive in Ruby.

This is one of those posts for which poe's law was written. (notsure)

Challenge accepted!!!! (Possibly missing the point)

     setOfAllPossibleStatesOfWorld.every(s => s.app.isRewrittenInNode) && app.rubyVersion.hasReallyUnintuitiveUI

My experience was quite different. Good content, fast delivery, 10/10 would shutdown again!

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.

This turn of events is quite surprising. After they secured the .com of their company name, I thought they'd made it as an industry standard.

I too am let down over their broken promises. After $30 Million in seed funding you'd think they'd get their act together.

    $ whois shutdownify.com
       Updated Date: 19-aug-2015
       Creation Date: 19-aug-2015
       Expiration Date: 19-aug-2016

Their incredible journey....

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).

Haha, brilliant. I believed it for more than a moment. The WHOIS records spill the beans, though:

  Creation Date: 19-aug-2015

Haha it's fooling virtually everyone in this thread

... in part due to some hilariously complicit Hacker News accounts that are making serious-sounding comments. Not gonna lie; I was initially fooled.

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.

Because we all know that failed businesses have plenty of money left over to outsource their shutdown notices ;)

Testimonial:

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!

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.

Edit: Can anyone suggest alternatives?

http://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/

The biggest blow being dealt to Alphabet primarily, in the acquisitions branch.

Are we sure they're actually shutting down? Maybe this is just a demonstration of their product, and the quality of the shutdown notice is so high that we're unable to distinguish this from the real thing.

As a matter of fact, fake shutdown notices could be a great source of...

=== NOTICE OF COMMENT SHUTDOWN ===

The board has decided that this comment stopped being funny several sentences ago, and has decided to disband the whole thing and go get a sandwich. Cheers!

Calling themselves shutdownly or shutdown.io probably would have saved them.

shutdownjoy.com

drop the 'shut'; downly, downjoy, and eventually migrate to down.io and down.com, they would certainly have succeeded

No way zenshutdown.com

startup-shutdown.info

"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

How about getshutdown.com?

getshutdownhq.io?

They need a dot com, so strike out the .io [1]

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/name.html

We're approaching the days when having the .com isn't necessary.

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.

shtdwn.ly

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.

You just know there's a startup somewhere saying, "Dammit, that was our idea!".

Wow, for a split second I thought that was real!

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".

Not only that, but I was pretty sure I had heard of them.

Does this count as dogfooding?

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.

"Our board has decided that the company should shut down now and sell all remaining assets"

I am floored that someone actually invested in this idea, much less an actual board of directors.

Whoops, just realized this is all a joke. Thank God.

I really hope this is a brilliant piece of satire.

Based on the creation date from it's whois info I'd say it's satire:

   Domain Name: SHUTDOWNIFY.COM
   Registrar: 1 & 1 INTERNET AG
   Sponsoring Registrar IANA ID: 83
   Whois Server: whois.1and1.com
   Referral URL: http://1and1.com
   Name Server: NS1.DREAMHOST.COM
   Name Server: NS2.DREAMHOST.COM
   Name Server: NS3.DREAMHOST.COM
   Status: ok http://www.icann.org/epp#OK
   Updated Date: 19-aug-2015
   Creation Date: 19-aug-2015
   Expiration Date: 19-aug-2016

Start-ups these days, eh? Serious lack of commitment!

You are so 2013. Fail fast!

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?

For all the satisfied clients, and the investors that just took a writedown on this year's tax return, now's a good reminder that the Internet Archive accepts donations:

http://web.archive.org/web/20150819204235/http://www.shutdow...

Cue the press release announcing their assets have been purchased by Acquirely...

If you guys don't know the author (Shaun Gallagher), he's a pretty awesome guy!

He's also the author of http://www.correlated.org/

...and http://www.experimentingwithbabies.com. Awesome stuff!

I had the opportunity to meet the CEO and founding team. Brilliant guys. But they got too caught up with the how. Ruby then to Node and now to Go. The promises - from companies shutting down to pay up, didn't pan out. I wish there was a consumer version of this - I would love to set up a page to survive me after my demise and I prepay for 10 years of hosting. Demisify ?

The funny thing is this actually could be a good idea. Big companies do source code escrow as part of on premise software purchases. A SaaS equivalent which handled data portability, ongoing legal/compliance, etc, as a 10% surcharge on invoices or something, could solve this for SaaS, making purchases happen when they might not now.

https://twitter.com/shaun_gallagher/status/63410695062035251...

Shutdownify's last meal is its own dog food.

Believed it right up to this brilliant bit of snark.

(re)Curse you, Shutdownify!

Or, it's real and this is a publicity stunt to get some exposure, or a noncommittal way to see how people react to find out if anyone would actually be interested.

Everyone said they were the next unicorn. What happened?

I heard a legend that the Shutdownify stack detects that an entry has been created for Shutdownify itself. When that happens, it is treated like a FIN packet: the software serves up the shutdown notice, but schedules an actual shutdown of itself after a configured period.

I was in the market for such a solution and tried to use them, but the pricing was really high. I'm not sure that paying per view on a shutdown notice is the best model, I would have preferred a flat fee.

JMK: In the long run we're all dead.

Would've made a good corporate motto.

I don't know what it says about myself or the current state of startups but I thought this was real until coming to the comments.

As a very loyal and frequent shutdownify customer, I am willing to save the business. Offer is equity only.

How does something like this even get investors? The business model banks on the fact that start-ups are going to fail-- I could imagine scenarios where potential investors also have money invested into the companies that Shutdownify would be servicing.

It was a perfect business that didn't get the timing right. Their business would have thrived during 2000, 2008. Now if they lasted a few more months, they would have been perfectly positioned to take major market share in the Fall 2015 recession.

Sadly, my first thought was someone tried to outsource the gathering of company failures to the actual company so they could write an f'd company article for the ad revenue. Worse, this didn't sound as bad as other business concepts.

Reminds me of a 30 Rock bit where Jack is talking about Tracy's kooky investment:

(S03E15) "His video game made a fortune and he invested all of it in a company that dismantles bank signs. They're doing very well."

This is fucking hilarious.

Guess they couldn't compete with ExitPlan.com . They do full shutdowns and acquisitions, as well as auctioning off the redundant employees to the highest bidder.

https://www.reddit.com/r/shutdown/

Business model failure: Bankrupt startups couldn't swing the monthly recurring payments after shutting down. Pity. Goodbye Shutdownify.

This is the Silicon Valley version of Möbius Strip.

while we are chatting trivialities, does somebody know where the constant "pinterest is shutting down" rumours http://replycam.com/i/Screen_Shot_2015-08-19_at_22_50_13_1B8... are coming from?

Those google results come from their app crashing and people seeking remedies

Brilliant. Considering they can still use their own service, does the recursion mean infinite $$$, or a stack overflow?

Shutdownify github page now leads to 404. You would think they should know better than that. Stay classy, S9Y.

That's what you get when you bet on other startups failure

This should've been their landing page all along.

Is this legit? I can't find anything about them.

They used to be called startupify, but they pivoted earlier this week to get ahead of the bursting startup bubble.

Unfortunately it looks like they ran out of runway soon after the pivot.

Far and away, one of the great trolls of all time!

Best HN title I have read in a while.

can someone actually build this service? thx.

/checks date

Very meta ...

tl;dr :: shutdownify^2

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!

Don't feel bad for taking it seriously. I can't tell satire these days. The world is too strange.

My thoughts went from satire, to serious, then back to satire. It's worrying how plausible it was that this was a real business at some point in time.

Is it just me or does this title keep changing?

kthxbye

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