Fieldbook is shutting down
medium.com
medium.com
1. Raised $2.9m, 4 employees, 5 years. Let's say 2/3 of overhead was salary, which seems reasonable. So that's 500k each, or 100k/yr. This seems excessive? Were the founders paying themselves too much? Or where did the money go?
2. Difficulty in hiring. This seems very much attributable with the company's proximity to the SF black hole. Was relocation never even considered? And why was remote not considered? I would have liked to hear the reasons for those decisions.
All the points about potential recruits demanding "sexy" jobs or wanting to see high growth and large rounds seem pretty much exclusively SF problems. It seems like moving literally anywhere else would have solved this.
3. What is the actual reason for closing down? Out of money, or out of confidence? If my salary numbers above are wrong - and I should hope they are - maybe they still have a mil or so left, which seems like enough runway to take a stab at least some of the problems.
There were two seemingly contradictory considerations: lack of ability to iterate fast enough, and a realisation that the product was not viable. I would have liked to hear more about this too - iterating faster on the wrong thing would not have helped.
4. I know it's too late but even as an IT type when I look at the landing page I have very little idea what the product even does. A lot of features and use cases listed but what is the product and how does it solve any problem? There's a single screenshot four page heights down which looks like some kind of spreadsheet. It's not nearly enough.
Still, an honest, insightful and heartfelt piece and I wish the team good luck.
This comment is so naive that I don't know where to begin. You can't hire any quality people at $100k / yr fully loaded in SF Bay area.
A company with two employees recruiting a head of growth while there is noone to do any of the work that needs to be done.
Were they looking to hire in the SF/SV area only? I enjoy these kinds of projects (though wasn't & am not looking for a FT role), and I know a few others who do — but because we’re not driven by the hype train, we don’t live in the normal ‘tech’ areas.
Further down the article I see they were on the 'peninsula' (not sure where that is) and didn't want to become a remote team. But if they weren't in SF, there must be programmers around who enjoy data work, not buzzword-tech?
I am curious to see what happens with other apps like airtable, rowshare or zenkit and the whole market. Will they be able to survive as independent companies (like Tableau or Qlik in self-service BI)?
It is also the most difficult feature to implement from the theoretical point of view and non-obvious feature for the users to understand. Therefore, we still have the relational world and the spreadsheet world existing separately almost in isolation.
As mentioned here, I don't see this razor-sharp focus in Fieldbook, which could be the reason of missing traction?
Fundo is about to undergo a major transformation, exactly for the reason of simplicity..
any users of airtable (i'm not one) can comment on what he thinks Airtable got right?
>In contrast, our closest competitor, Airtable, seems to be getting more traction. Early on, their product focus was subtly different, with more emphasis on mobile experience and collaboration features than on data modeling or formulas. These aren’t the features that were most important to the users we talked to, but they’re easier to understand, and I suspect they made both marketing and onboarding easier for Airtable—maybe just enough to make all the difference.
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Edit: here's their most successful Show HN from 3years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10752570
and a month before that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10508038