Buxfer's (YC 07) founders work for Facebook. Who works for Buxfer? | Hacker News Reader

Buxfer's (YC 07) founders work for Facebook. Who works for Buxfer?

techcrunch.com

52 pointsptm20 comments

This is a bit absurd. When a company is floundering, everyone knows it, including investors. Shutting down is a very reasonable choice sometimes. The death is often just keeping the site running without updates, as in this case.

I don't advocate failure, but I don't think it makes sense to waste years on a product that doesn't have legs.

In this specific case, I wouldn't worry about reputations. Everyone who has worked with Ashwin knows he is awesome.

As for the general trend, this post by Jason Cohen is right on the money: http://blog.asmartbear.com/rejecting-raising-vc-money.html

What seems strange to me is that they have paying customers who are saying on the support forum that they are getting zero response to their e-mails to the company. Fine, if you're going to shut it down then shut it down, but I wouldn't walk away from paying customers without saying something.

I agree generally, but I don't think an anecdote means enough to warrant a TechCrunch post. Support is hard.

ivankirigin,

If buxfer is indeed shutting down without saying something to their users, it warrants a Techcrunch post. I would have wanted TC though to have gotten the side of the founders before publishing the story.

Not working on something full time is not the same as shutting down. Slow for support is also not the same as shutting down.

This isn't an instance of founders giving up too early. They tried hard. In fact, it is more impressive that they continued to keep the site going after running out of money and having to get jobs than if they'd shut it down completely.

I'll remember that next time someone asks me about my old zombie startup.

I agree, but it's a real bummer - my wife and I have used Buxfer for a couple years now, and now I'm wondering whether I should be scrambling to find another service because I don't want to lose two years worth of data should they decide to stop paying for their servers tomorrow.

Somewhat tangentially, as I get older, I find myself getting a little more cynical about paying for services from startup companies for fear of exactly this scenario - the fabulous hackers who start it find a shinier coin. How did you overcome this when you were selling Viaweb to your first few customers? Or were you dealing with mom and pop shops that were small enough not to care?

(BTW, my comments aren't directed at the Buxfer guys - as you mentioned, this would be a wildly unfair description of two guys who have kept alive a pretty damn usable zombie service.)

Arrington assumes that just because nobody told him about Buxfer's shutting down (which is probably all that really happened here), their investors don't know it either.

So then he speculates that the founders are scamming or making fools of their investors.

If he keeps posting like this, it is his own reputation which will suffer.

I find the last clause of your post to be a bit ludicrous. Arrington seems to still have some kind of reputation, but not because of the quality of his postings. There's been innumerable speculative and generally shoddy posts over the years.

See previous discussion, when only one of them had left: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=399661

I use buxfer practically every day and would be sad to see it go. I notice the odd bug but its nothing really to fret over. As long as my data stays secure I don't really need any new features and am happy for the founders if they're successfully taking the hands-off approach. Thanks for providing a great service for free!

The investments came in in 1/07 and 4/07 - a total of $315,000.00 - which if you break it down leaves barely ramen money for two founders and business expenses.

The fact that co-founder Pandit spent a full two years on this start-up is nothing to be ashamed of.

Lots of us here know the acute pain of a start-up that fails to get traction, and considering that he kept beating the drum even after seeing his co-founder leave is a huge testament to his character.

This is a terrible example on TechCrunch's part to illustrate a point they want to support about young entrepreneurs taking advantage of angels.

Can't blame them for trying though right?

I'm not agreeing with TC on this terrible article.

But, I will say that $315,000 would have been 5-6 years of money for my start-up, based on how much money my co-founder and I spent before becoming profitable.

If you think ramen-living means spending more, or even as much as $50/K per person per year, you're coming from a different place than me.

H-1B rules

Understand where you're coming from, but with Buxfer I am guessing they had more costs than the average start-up.

I base this on assuming that they had licensing agreements to allow for syncronising w/financial institutions.

Mint.com shared some data at one point noting that their largest cost had been those API sets and access, from a cursory glance I'm assuming that Buxfer had to use similar . . .

One thing I don't like is nothing on Buxfer's site tells you they are dead - I was considering signing up as a new customer, but suspicious due to the lack of blog activity and the questions if they are dead on GetSatisfaction. They looked like a really decent web 2.0 style personal finance manager, with some really slick features. Way nicer than Mint.

I'm looking for a good personal finance tool that is not US-centric & actually considered giving buxfer a try. Not sure now with their ghost-town status. Anyone know good alternatives?

I still do not get why Buxfer wasn't acquired.

IMO it took them a while to find their niche. At the start it seemed to be all about easily dividing expenses among friends. In the 3 years I've used the site I've used that feature exactly once and it didn't work because one of my friends never bothered to sign up.

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