Why We Shut Down a Business That Was Making Money | Hacker News Reader

Why We Shut Down a Business That Was Making Money

grasshoppergroup.com

25 pointsdh9 comments

Answer: because they had another product that was making more money.

They never actually came out and said it in the article, but it sounds like the thing that shut down was just squeaking by and distracting their core, profitable, business.

So while plenty of us would be happy to be running this abandoned product on our own as a sole developer/marketer, it wasn't a big enough thing to make a dent in their already thriving company. So they dropped it.

It was a combination of that as well as the potential of the product to fill a real need once we got customer feedback.

>They never actually came out and said it in the article, but it sounds like the thing that shut down was just squeaking by and distracting their core, profitable, business.

I sure hope that is the case. The only other take-away I saw in that article was that they're so incompetent at management that they couldn't even clean up the organization of a profitable entity. That the management was just so bad its a better decision to kill the product than let it bumble around until it was no longer profitable.

Knowing when to pull the plug on a product is a key part of growing a company aimed at developing multiple products. We'll go through all the lessons learned over the next few weeks and reasons why we shut it down - keep checking back, lots of valuable info.

The article doesn't mention why they shut it down.

Judging by the excuses given in the post, I'm going to guess that 'stress' is the answer. It sounds like a crazy place to work, even if it's making money. It could very well be that everyone decided to quit, and so it just dissolved.

Nope, no one quit - the core team is now on other products in the company. Check back for parts 2 and beyond for updates, great lessons learned.

It seems unlikely that an entire company would disband simply due to stress.

Or how much money they were making.

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