Etacts (YC W10) Shutting Down | Hacker News Reader

Etacts (YC W10) Shutting Down

etacts.com

105 pointsOmnipresent63 comments

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"We will remain fully operational during the transition"

Transitioning from operational to shut down...? That's odd word choice.

...from operational, to Salesforce!

Aha! http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/21/salesforce-buys-email-conta...

Did I read that correctly? Ashton Kutcher is an angel investor?

He is listed on Angel List so I would assume so.

In my opinion, the problem with reminder services is that I have to remember to use them.

They can ping me all day via email, twitter, facebook, SMS, whatever, but it takes only 1 or 2 pings before my subconscious trains itself to ignore the reminders.

Also, a reminder is hit and miss. If I don't have time to take action on the reminder, it fails.

In my opinion, if you don't remember something yourself and then ignore something telling you about it can be called on purpose.

But maybe it just means, this is not the right service for you.

That's deeply unfortunate. I loved you guys on demo day.

Based on my choices, apparently I shouldn't try more angel investment. I was an investor in NewsLabs. This would have been another "yeah, let's invest" choice if they were interested (they weren't). I think I may have picked the two first to close up shop.

or etacts got acquired, of two startups you'd have invested in, one had an exit (and the other returned some of your money?) - now scale that intuition to an entire portfolio ... :)

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/email_crm_startup_etact...

NewsLabs did indeed return some of the money.

There are several companies that I could have easily chosen that seem to have done well. It's just that the ones where you can see in advance that they're going to rock usually aren't looking for small, independent investors without a network of contacts.

In fact, by demo day several of them had already taken enough funding from seriously high-prestige investors that they weren't really looking even then.

The Etacts guys were very pleasant and personable about that, though, and were still very happy to talk :-)

I hope they did get acquired. Go them!

I didn't realize you were angel investing, Noah. Drop me a line.

NewsLabs wasn't raising enough money, so I didn't even consider it. I've said it before but: don't invest in companies raising too little. They will fail.

> "I've said it before but: don't invest in companies raising too little. They will fail."

I presume that by 'they will fail', you mean that the company will fail to make your required ROI as an investor, being acquired for millions?

At first read it seems like you're saying that unless you raise a ton of money you can't build a successful profitable business...

IMHO Newslabs failed because it was a terrible idea, not because of anything else.

I mean that it will go out of business.

Venture backed companies raise mone because they have have some significant buildout to complete before they can got market. Raise too little and the chances of reaching that point are too small.

Additionally, if a startup cannot attract a certain amount of interest from investors, that is a big hint, too.

Note that didn't say how much that minimum is. You are making assumptions.

Bootstrapped businesses are great, too. But I am talking about a different kind of company.

Anyway, yes, the news space is dismal and I avoid it. But I never needed to get to that part of the analysis.

Thanks for clarifying. VC backed startups seem like a whole different world.

Well, raising money = venture backed.

Interesting perspective on "raising too little". I was previously unaware that all bootstrapped companies fail.

That's not what he said at all, you made an illogical leap there. He was obviously talking about companies seeking VC.

I am amazed how such a small team can use $650k of funding in just 6-7 months. Can anyone comment?

Though I would love to see a detailed postmortem post on this.

Partly they're amazing guys. If you talked to them, you'd understand some of how they managed.

All that stuff PG talks about -- utter confidence, and projecting "we're going to succeed and change the world," like it was just going to happen with you or without you? They were really good at that.

I think you misunderstood me. I did not ask how they raised $650k. I asked how they used up all this money in 6 months. (Assuming they are shutting down and have no money left)

They have been acquired by salesforce apparently

Apparently they're being bought out:

http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/21/salesforce-buys-email-conta...

If they are being bought out, seems like a sloppy way to handle the communication. At a minimum it's confusing to existing users, which I assume Salesforce would like to keep.

Doesn't Salesforce have a rather more limited target market than etacts? I've never used either product but I get the impression that Salesforce is targeted to salesmen and etacts is targeted to the general population.

I was wondering why shut it down?...this is a great product/tool - easy to use. Great exit.

I'd love a postmortem.

Agreed. They didn't seem to have issues finding investments or visibility. If this is one of those "other issues" cases, there's lots to learn from here.

Startups don't fail due to a lack of funding or visibility; that's pretty much the default.

Hmm. That's interesting. I can think of many products that failed essentially because no one heard of them and not because they were too expensive. I guess I didn't think too much before applying this analogy to startups.

Could you cite some interesting examples of startup failures worth reading about?

"I can think of many products that failed essentially because no one heard of them and not because they were too expensive."

Products don't fail because no one has heard of them, they fail because no one buys them. It's your job to go out and find customers; waiting for people to hear about you isn't a strategy, it's a 100% guaranteed way to fail.

Real entrepreneurs figure out their customer acquisition strategy before designing and building their product. Those who do it the other way around aren't entrepreneurs, they're just hobbyists. Read Four Steps to the Epiphany, Crossing the Chasm, Bootstrappers Bible, etc.

Thanks much! For me (a hobbyist looking to be an entrepreneur), your response was spot on.

One of the reasons I'm leery of using products made by startups, in addition to the risk of them failing, sometimes when they succeed you lose just as much as if they'd failed.

We got burned pretty bad with a product a few years ago when our payment provider was acquired and basically just shutdown without providing any means of migrating. It was a subscription based data service and half of our customers canceled because they no longer trusted us with their data after we "lost" their payment information and they had to re-enter it.

I signed up for this service but didn't really use it. I really like the concept. It wanted to remind you when you hadn't been in contact with friends in a while. Good luck to these guys.

Does any of the Etacts guys (or anyone else) know why they didn't target Facebook?

Hard to not see the implicit, inherent irony that they couldn't determine an effective way to remind you to use the service.

I found their reminders effective because they were so spot on, people I really did need to contact.

Same goes for Email Oracle: https://emailoracle.com/

Edit: yes, they were both made by the same team...

https://etacts.com/ & https://emailoracle.com/ carry same message, word to word. Guess they both were run by the same people.

I think you're correct. The privacy policy link on emailoracle.com points to the etacts privacy policy.

hmm closing on same day. template for the "closing" message seems same. even wording is similar. I smell something funky

Why does everyone assume they "gave up" or "run out of money"? A private or yet to be announced acquisition is just as likely...

Didn't they raise a strong seed round in the past few months?

Crunchbase says 650k after demo day in May.

http://www.crunchbase.com/company/etacts

$650k according to CrunchBase on 5/14/2010 http://www.crunchbase.com/company/etacts

Depending on what they spent money on since then they could be reaching the next point of fundraising again and decided it wasn't the right thing to go do.

Off to work at facebook?

I'd believe that

is google believable too?

Anyone that knows about a service for tracking and remind you about unanswered emails? Etacts (and their service EmailOracle) was saving me so many hours each week. Need to find some new service for this! Do anyone knows a service that does the same (track and remind unanswered emails)?

I'm not sure what I'd import the data into (at least right now), but it'd be nice if they offered an export functionality rather than just wholesale killing all the data. I don't use it all the time, but the followup feature was great and something that I'm going to miss having.

This seemed like a great idea. I bet the biggest obstacle were privacy concerns.

They provided a service which I would not have minded paying for (with a few more features). So I am really surprised to hear this.

Looking forward to hearing why the decision was made.

It was a good product that caught the eye. Though, I didn't have a good use for it I had few friends who used it on regular basis. Entertain a theory of them catching google's eye?

I always meant to create a Greasemonkey script that lets your friends pictures decay physically on Facebook or Twitter if you don't stay in touch. Still think that could be fun.

Great service, used it all the time. Did priority inbox killed it? However, the idea of tracking response to important emails, and contacts you was not in touch with, is great.

I've been trialing both etacts and gist for a while and really preferred much of what etacts was doing, particularly the more sensible time-since-last-contact reminders, etc.

Is there any alternative?

I've used both Gist.com and Rapportive.com...

To my knowledge, neither has a "days since contact" feature.

Agreed --- going to miss etacts, and hope one of the other companies can build something similar in. I need something that will automatically remind me to contact people within the network.

"... and hope one of the other companies can build something similar in..." Well, EmailOracle is very similar and it is closing too, exactly on Jan 31, 2011

I used Etacts with Gmail and I prefer it over Rapportive, Mingly, and Gist. I'm not sure what I'll switch to.

http://www.socialcaddy.com

It supports LinkedIn, Gmail and Facebook. I find it really useful to catch up on things I miss out on in the streams...

Been following these guys for a while since they were in an adjacent space to us. Sad to see them go.

We're officially releasing this post-holiday madness: http://hobsonfiles.com/signup

It's a contact/task manager/collab tool which is useful in reminding you to follow-up with contacts but we solve the problem differently.

I really liked this startup...

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