Runscope acquisition falls through | Hacker News Reader

Runscope acquisition falls through

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117 pointsbentlegen33 comments

This post is getting more attention then intended but I'll be back later tonight after my hockey game to answer any questions.

I do just want to state unequivocally that we do not intend to shut down, we're still growing and are as sustainable as ever. Customers don't need to worry about us disappearing.

"As sustainable as ever" might not be the best way to phrase things, given that the previous state was in your own words "a long way from self-sustaining".

Fair point. In retrospect it felt sustainable fresh off our last round given the market at the time and the amount of runway it gave us. Not saying that it was, just that it felt that way.

Hey, let me be the first to say welcome back to the land of 10,000 traffic cones. The fun is just getting started. Hopefully you'll stay clear of the impending traffic mess that is the west burbs as of, according to MnDOT... 6 hours ago.

Thanks again for our call in December :)

John, congrats on being a new dad...I'm one as well. Having a kid affords you an interesting sense of clarity and vision. For me, it's allowed me to look further down the road and make better decisions for my family's future..not just mine.

Also, I'm sure the Wild will beat the Blackhawks in the playoffs this year....I'm just sure of it.

Hey John, I just wanted to say thanks for providing an awesome service. We're happy customers.

I know how hard it can be to have a business go through tough times, but it sounds like you've got a lot of options and I wish you and Runscope the best.

Thanks for sharing the post. You've probably helped more founders with that than you know.

Anyways, welcome back to the Midwest, if you make it to Madison ever stop by the Ionic offices and say hi, I know several people on our team love your product!

How am I just learning about Runscope? This service is fantastic. I just signed up for free, they have a really smooth onboarding process, I now have a free API monitor pinging my API from multiple geographic locations and verifying correctness of the return value, they are generating some neat reports, and it looks like they even have a control I can publish/iframe with a nice graphical history.

I mean, this is almost better than StatusPage.io type solution just because it's so simple. The pricing is serious, and I think reasonable but it will be un-affordable for some. For now I'll play with the free option and will upgrade as soon as there's funding.

I really wish you luck with this product, it provides real value and is easy to use, that should be enough.

Edit: So I read that you raised $6m. I'm sure that helped create this software. What's great is the company can now take its time earn back that money, and if you can focus on the features that matter you can grow the feature-set in a controlled simple manor. The only problem I forsee is the investors may never see a return on the $6m, or rather, selling shares will never surpass the liquidation preference, so the challenge is paying yourself enough. If you have Board control you will be able to issue dividends, but otherwise getting cash out of the company will be hard.

>the feature-set in a controlled simple manor

I'm not sure using the $6 million to buy a manor is a good use of funds ;)

Runscope is a great service. I learned about it around a year and a half ago and utilized it to monitor and log an API I was building to act as midware betweens a user-consumed IOS app and an android administrative app for a huge event ('the big game'). It really helped us because we were on such a tight time line. I can't count how many times there was an issue with one of the two apps and I was able to quickly track it down and notify the proper team so they could fix the issue.

> If you have Board control you will be able to issue dividends

Most VCs insist on a protective provision that requires their approval to issue dividends to the founders/employees (i.e., common stock). So yeah--focus on either building a company that will sell for more than the liquidation preference or at least push for a comfortable salary.

John: really sorry to hear what a tough time you've been having. I hope you're through the worst of it.

I recently started using Runscope as part of an R&D project and it's been a revelation: it makes debugging API-related issues SO MUCH easier than any other approach I've used. It's saved me many hours of work. I'm a very happy paying customer.

One example: are you using Elasticsearch? Proxy your requests through Runscope and you can see exactly what happened with every query - both the full request and the response. And... you can share individual requests with other developers to help with debugging complex issues.

I appreciate the absolute heart-on-sleeve but you're not in "post mortem" mode, you're in transition mode!

Your message - from the first sentence to choosing "default dead" in telling the story reads negative.

Same message, different delivery:

"First the good news - Runscope is now cash flow positive and in it for the long-haul!

In other words we're "Default Alive"* and even though the road getting there has been bumpy, we're more committed than ever.

We're even moving our core team back to sunny Minnesota to continue managing costs and expand our team more sustainably."

- - - -

I have huge respect for what you are going through and wordsmithing at this critical stage when customers are thinking "What the fuck is going on at RunScape" will have an impact on your business.

Stay positive and upbeat publicly, especially when you have a positive message to deliver!

I found the tone refreshing, personally

That's great advice on tone. I wrote this more for family and friends back home who were going to wonder why we were back. If I was writing it for HN it would have been very different :)

The good news from this announcement is that they aren't shutting the service down, as their costs have now fallen enough that they are cash flow positive.

Prior discussion on HN about a $6 million Series A, raised two years ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7568598

It is interesting that the founder has decided to leave SF. It is getting to the point in the Bay Area that PG's concept of "ramen" profitability is becoming just a dream as costs continue to skyrocket. I think we are going to see the industry start to fan out geographically in the next couple years.

Isn't the problem that VCs insist on companies locating near Sand Hill Road?

I wouldn't read too much into it. I love the Bay Area. Rent is crazy, but there's no better place to run a startup.

I met John a few years ago, and he's one of my favorite founders. He's smart, on top of things, personable, and effective. He's been a huge inspiration to me, and I find myself constantly thinking "what would John do?" when in a tough spot.

I'm sad he won't be in SF (and sadder I didn't take advantage of it more when he was), but excited to see what happens. John doesn't give up... this is just another step in a long journey.

Like the adage goes, "This too shall pass".

"Without a team—soon to be without an office—our ongoing expenditures are now minimal. This makes the company cash-flow positive."

Congrats on becoming cash-flow positive! Sounds like you are making a lot of good decisions which will hopefully put you and your family in a much better place.

Fortunately, unlike many other startups that we read about on here that bite the dust, you can actually pay for Runscope. Which I do. I think they have a bright future as a sustainable company.

When I saw you guys at Pycon last year in Montreal, I thought you had a great product, and a catchy slogan that I kept repeating to myself, especially after I was laid off.

Everying is going to be 200 Ok.

And it will be.

You guys have an amazing product that has saved me so much time in the past few years. Good luck.

Good luck to you and hope you get another offer that will resurrect your company to full staff

@johns: who is gonna take care of your awesome community projects? If you need help, let us know. We are using them all the time...

We definitely want to keep them going. They're a great source of leads. If you're using them all the time though, sign up for a Runscope subscription! That's the best way to support those sites.

So if you had to do this again, would you have taken VC?

For this company, absolutely. It's not perfect for every kind of business, but for what we wanted to accomplish I think it was the best path to do so. I'd just ask them better questions about failure scenarios :)

Was there a better way to line up a acquisition process that didn't endanger all the employees jobs?

This was a really tricky balance. We could have let some people go earlier to extend runway and maybe give us more time to optimize an exit, but at the cost of morale and perhaps a subsequent talent drain. We also knew the people were going to be a focal point for an acquisition so the more good people we could keep around, the better our value to an acquirer. All things considered we ultimately choose to hold on to as many of them as we could for as long as we could while trying to be transparent about our status so they could decide if it was worth it for them to hang around.

> All things considered...

This sounds like an impossible balance to the detriment of people.

Thanks for sharing this perspective.

It's a testament to the the tools and infrastructure that your team built that a two man team can keep Runscope in a cash positive holding pattern. If this is rock bottom then Runscope is far more resilient than the sea of other non revenue generating companies in this environment. again. props for being open. hope you get to share more lessons as time heals.

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