Sprintly Is Not Shutting Down

The title above originally said "is shutting down" but we've since received an email saying that was reversed, so I changed the title to reflect that.

I wish there were a sort of gentlemen’s agreement that cool projects like this that don’t make it as businesses would be open sourced.

Almost every project is based on open source stuff somewhere in the stack, whether it’s the OS, the main programming languages, frameworks, or whatever. And most people don’t have the time to contribute a ton to the tools we all use.

It would be really neat if companies that don’t make it could give a bequest to the various communities and help build a massive library of stuff that, at least at one point in time, ran successfully in production, delivered a certain level of scale, and was able to make some money. If for anthropological or historical or research purposes if nothing else.

Always a shame to see a company shut down that many people have poured years of effort and belief into.

Maybe a lesson here - I have engineering and PM responsibilities and couldn't be more squarely in the target market - still I have never heard of this product, I wonder how they marketed it…

I’ve used sprintly in the past and overall quite liked it, but there were bugs and feature requests in their tracker, untouched for years, with comments like “yes, soon”. Besides the odd few reporting features, it just felt to me that development stopped and stagnated. This is a large reason why I didn’t go back to using it.

Overall, I liked sprintly and am sad to see it shut down, but I’m surprised it survived this long given how it started to feel a bit abandoned. (Sure you could argue if it’s not broken don’t fix it and sprintly mostly worked great, despite some issues being untouched so long, so I don’t think that’s what happened here. I do think it was perhaps a marketing problem not a feature/product problem, but it just gave a very abandoned impression)

I found out about it on recommendation by one of their advisers. I would never have heard about it otherwise so definitely think that it could have been better marketed. Although, with that said, it’s teue that sprintly was opinionated and that most teams have their own opinions that may not match up. For example, I wanted a way of having a pool of tasks that people could choose from rather than strict ordering (eg maybe a priority system where any equal-priority task at the top can be taken, not just the top task) but sprintly didn’t have any way of marking priorities or groups and they didn’t want to add the feature because it went against their strict top task next workflow. I’m not at all saying they should have supported that feature, of course, just how even small differences in opinion on workflow can make the tool less of a fit.

JIRA is the opposite in that it lets you customise it to fit whatever workflow you like, but in the process becomes a complex beast that I dislike using. I at least enjoyed using sprintly even if it didn’t always fit perfectly.

In any case, good luck on future ventures!

I don't use sprint.ly, although I've been aware of it for a while, but this does slightly worry me, and certainly it's sad to hear of something that's been a very personal investment for somebody failing.

We use Clubhouse, another project management system cut from the "more than Trello, less than JIRA, and somewhat opinionated about how you should work" mould. I don't love it in some ways but, y'know, it's pretty good. Our tech team, plus a number of people outside the team use it and, in the last 12 months, we've added getting on for 16,000 stories.

If Clubhouse failed I'm not sure exactly what we'd do: possibly use GitHub projects given that these are starting to get close to good enough (they've been good enough for my side-projects for a while). Hell if I'll go back to JIRA, but the thought of migrating all that data makes me feel slightly unwell no matter the eventual destination.

a swing-and-a-miss is still a swing...something few people are willing risk! best of luck on the next leg of the journey

My company used sprintly a few years back and our experience ranged from not-good to god-awful. It seemed like all feature requests were either ignored or met with the attitude of "We know better than you do", which was unhelpful at best.

That's too bad. It seemed to be going strong for more than half a decade. I was bummed when SimpleGeo, also cofounded by Joe Stump, got shut down after being acquired by Urban Airship [1] and glad to see Sprintly thriving. I think both can be counted as successes, but it's too bad that both no longer exist. I look forward to see what Joe Stump does next!

1: https://techcrunch.com/2012/01/13/with-simplegeos-shutdown-i...

I read this blog post while simultaneously entering stories into our Pivotal Tracker (PT) sprint backlog.

There is certainly market demand for good, agile PM tools. Hope this Founder does a reboot after retrospective.

My experience with Sprintly was that it was god-awful slow and had a user interface straight out of 2008.

When I closed my CRM system I put it on cheap hosting and left it up for all the users who are currently using it let them drop off on their own.

> Something that wasn't quite as complicated as JIRA, but offered more powerful features than a Trello.

Clubhouse.io fits this perfectly for my team.

That’s too bad. I wanted to work on the product a few years back but I could tell they really just wanted me to work on consulting projects, and the Sprintly work (if it ever came around) would be a “reward”. Too many aspects of it made my Spidey senses tingle to accept.

Courageous decision. I tip my hat to you. Best Wishes!

Congratulations on getting up to bat and giving it your all. Consider the loss tuition.

Are there any .ly companies that are just killing it?