Notifo (YC W10) Will be Shutting Down | Hacker News Reader

Notifo (YC W10) Will be Shutting Down

blog.notifo.com

231 pointsjazzychad84 comments

Sad to see this go. On a more positive note, I'm really impressed with this shut down notice.

It gives a brief explanation of the situation, clear indication of what might happen next and alternatives that people might consider.

I've had to draft one of these before so I know it's difficult. Especially the part where you mention alternatives because there's no going back after that. The only thing I'd have done in addition is to email the same message to all users (but that might already be in progress - Edit: It is).

Kudos and thanks for the service so far.

Thank you. I worked very hard to make sure that the announcement was as 'professional' as possible. I've seen too many other companies get railed for poor interaction with their users when shutting down, and I wanted to avoid that.

I sent an email to all service account owners with the same information to make sure that they read it, since they will be impacted the most by having to switch to a new solution.

I'm curious, have you considered leaving the site online, but charging a small amount per month for personal access?

I'm guessing there might be a fair number of people (myself included) who will miss it, and it might at least provide you a little extra income on the side without too much effort or expense.

Agreed. I too find the service useful enough that I would be willing to pay for it.

I received an email with the same text shortly after reading the post.

Chad, I am sorry to hear about this. I understand the frustration and other negative feelings associated with shutting down something that you've put a lot of effort and hope into.

I have a question. You mentioned that Notifo never gained enough traction with publishers or consumers. Can you share with us some of the metrics around this, in terms of targets and actual usage? Also, what are some of the things you tried to do in terms of marketing when it was clear that word of mouth and the other methods weren't working?

Wow...kudos on having the balls to a) admit this finally - especially given the implicit pressure you must feel being a part of YC with PG's "perseverance is everything" mantra. and b) admit it so candidly and publicly.

Why could you just not leave it running (on Heroku's free plan for instance) and not maintain it for a while and see what happens?

Or did you do this already and realized that it needed you hands-on daily to work?

Or is there some pre-text to have taken money from YC and Yuri Milner that you basically have to officially kill it and liquidate everything?

Well, I didn't get the Yuri money (that started two batches after mine), otherwise the runway would have been much longer.

The system is too custom to run on any of the Heroku-like services out there. I'm exploring other potential options, but I'm not one to give out false hope.

Just my opinion, but there's no shame whatever in killing it dead, and it is probably optimal for both you and your users/customers. I take a salary to be the on-call ops guy for my services. If Notifo isn't paying the bills, the heck with that. A server dying at 3 AM in the morning is your problem if and only if you are getting compensated to worry about that.

You have a life to lead, at Twilio (or wherever) and all the parts of your life that are more important than working. The Notifo chapter is over. Much love to users from those days, but they don't get a moral claim on your time until doomsday because you happened to write some code that one time.

It's also maximally in their interests to be clear about this: Notifo is going away. It will not be improved, it will not be maintained, it will not be supported, it will probably not be turned into whatever some does-not-do-this-for-a-living person thinks is an ideal way to continue providing service to them for free to far-too-cheap. If your notification needs matter to you, start transitioning now.

Patrick -- are you going to change the name of Appointment Reminder now? I think I remember you posting that you had notiphone.com registered for it - but went with the boring name option instead of clashing with a new yc company.

Prior to reading today, I would have said "I might change the name of Appointment Reminder at some point in the future, but have no specific plans to do it in the near future." I think that's pretty much still true.

Plus "notiphone.com" sounds like an anti-Apple website.

FWIW, I read it as Not iPhone dot com at first.

The founder's post: http://blog.jazzychad.net/2011/09/08/fouling-out-moving-on.h...

So what am I going to use for my HN replies notifications and my retweet notifications now?

I always liked notifo, and this is a sad day for software.

Boxcar (http://boxcar.io) can send you retweet notifications, and I'll be reaching out to pg here shortly to add Boxcar support for HN notifications.

We would love to have you as a customer.

Is there any chance you'll support Android devices in the future? That was one of the huge selling points of Notifo, that it actually worked on more than just Apple products.

Yes, definitely. If you have an android device and would like to beta test it, email me (boxcar.io/about) and I'll send you a link.

Please help spread the word in return. :)

Kudos for the perfect message. Sad to see it go, though. It works so well and it's so easy to integrate. I'd gladly pay for the service, even the basic level, simply for the ease of use.

Why can't we save notifo?

Very sad to see it go, Notifo is probably one of the most frequently opened apps on my iphone. I'll second the sentiment: I'd gladly pay for the service.

I've been using Notifo for almost a year now (I think) and I always liked everything about it except the fact that it was free. I couldn't see how the company stands to make money without charging users.

So I always suspected this moment would come and I always wondered — why not simply charge people? I would have gladly paid, say, $20 a year — just for the limited amount of notifications I receive. It's a valuable service that appeals to an audience that values their time. Sure, you can hack your own notification system, but why bother if someone already did it for you?

I use Notifo with github, my monitoring systems, my backup systems and a bunch of other things. Again, charge me on the order of $20-$30 a year, and I'll pay.

I think the problem was they couldn't find enough people who wanted to use it for free, to bother trying to charge some of them with a premium package.

I will also pay this, just for HN reply notifications.

Seriously bummed. This was a reliable and (very) useful service for all of our environments on EC2. We had it tied in with Nagios and it worked quite well to alert us of issues.

Since this is official, we will probably start relying on PagerDuty now.

Sorry to hear this. I am a technologist at Cisco and I enjoyed showing the capabilities of Notifo in tech demos (for example, having a virtual assistant send links to my phone).

Them shutting down is going to have some interesting side effects with their Github integration. Wish Github would buy them up and continue running the service.

Boxcar (http://boxcar.io) offers Github notifications. We would love to have you as a customer.

Yeah, signed up yesterday at the request of a coworker.

Damn, that sucks. But why don't you try to make money in a different way? When I look at http://notifo.com/pricing I can't see you making (immediatly) money with this strategy. I think you'll have to become really big before services will pay for it.

I read in the comments that people like the github notifications, why not focus on developers & try to ask eg. $27 a year for it? I think if you look for low hanging fruits, you can certainly make a living from it. And once you do that, grow, grow,.. :)

Will you think about open sourcing the backend? Or selling it?

I second selling it. I've been surprised what a random website might get on Flippa, and Notifo has some recognition and cache. Might as well see if it can hit a reserve price - passing the service on at whatever price is probably good for the founders and users.

There is a similar type thing at www.notify.io which existed before notifio was around anyway.

Here are the bad news: it's also owned by another twilio employee and the single person behind it doesn't listen to the community, nor cares about it.

it is still around. just using it today to prototype webhooks with openstack

or licensing it?

What a bummer. I integrated notifo into my (as yet unreleased side-) project, and it was really easy to get going. The main purpose of my app is to send alerts, and I'd planned to highlight notifo integration as one of the features.

Good luck on your next adventure, Chad!

Sucks to see this happen, and to see Convore (which jazzychad wrote an iPad app for) floundering as well.

Hi all,

Convore co-founder here.

The company, Convore, is still very much alive and well.

However, we're currently working on a new, but related, product (https://grove.io/). We're still alpha testing it with a few users, but hope to have it out there soon.

Grove is a little more developer-focused, and my co-founders really wanted to work on a mainstream project. So yes, the Erics left Convore to start a new project, Can't Wait!, an iPhone app for watching new movie trailers.

That being said, the Convore iPad app by jazzychad is fantastic. jazzychad is a really smart guy and an excellent developer and I hope he has a great time working at Twilio (a pretty cool company themselves). I predict the future for jazzychad will be bright. :D

Whoa, I'm excited to see Grove! I was just thinking how I really prefer IRC to Campfire/Hipchat/etc, especially when properly setup with a good bouncer and such. But that is annoying, and some people are scared of it, so there's a good business opportunity in making IRC really easy to setup well, possibly with the ability for people who are scared of IRC to use some fancy, approachable frontend. (Wimps.)

What indication is there that Convore isn't doing well? What is the measure for success for it?

Two of the three founders left to do a new startup.

Ahh all good reasons, I figured they were still chugging along with Leah still being involved.

Source? (Edit: I believe you. I am just curious what they are doing now)

http://boilerplateinc.com/

http://cantwa.it/about/

A few months ago the UI became noticeably slower. At about the same time, anecdotally, multiple channels that I frequented saw a drop in participation, or at least, not much growth. These channels include the GitHub channel, the Changelog channel, and the Rails channel.

https://convore.com/feedback/convores-ui-is-very-slow/

Active users?

I had totally forgotten about convore.

It was a great ride! Have fun with Twilio and come by for a drink after your first day. :)

I'm the author of Howl (http://howlapp.com), another alternative for general push notifications.

Howl supports notification icons, stores notifications locally for offline viewing, and is a universal app. There is an official Growl plugin, and API for integration elsewhere.

Love the name "Howl", whoever came up with that should get a bonus.

Sorry to see this go. "Create a Notifo plugin for automation platform" has been at the top of my second-tier TODO list for quite a while. I hoped to be a big commercial purchaser of Notifo services. There's definitely a need for a unified notification system, but I respect that you need out and need a way to pay the bills. I only hope that the other services are as easy to interface with and support as many platforms as Notifo. Good luck in the future!

Edit: if there's any way for a paid option to keep Notifo going as a zombie process, please let us all know.

That's a bummer. Any chance of a public release, to keep it alive? Also, Hacker news will need an update now.

I was just thinking this. It seems incredibly selfish to put software into its grave simply because the current developer can't afford to continue working.

Sadly, my own project 1pix.me, which is based on Notifo will probably shut down when Notifo shuts down, as I probably won't have the time to change over to a different service.

But thank you for the great service - it was great while it lasted (I got your email earlier today).

I do want to add that as a developer who used the API to send 37916 (and counting) notifications, I fully expected to get an email one day asking for money. I never did, and that makes me sad.

This is a shame. Notifo was a great service, and to add insult to injury, I just finished adding Notifo support to my side project (http://loglet.radbox.org/) yesterday. https://github.com/sampsyo/loglet/commit/4b6923f7aaf9b076cdc...

I found the API straightforward and intelligible and signing up a new service was a breeze. I hope one of the alternatives is similarly well-designed.

I'm sorry for the founder that this didn't work out.

However, I always find it a bit crappy when services just suddenly shut down. Was there not the option to ask users for more money and/or donations?

Perhaps just being naive here and I admit I know nothing about Notifo... but it does seem like there's a systemic problem with innovative startups suddenly shutting up shop after running out of cash when perhaps they could have turned things around if they'd admitted to their customers earlier that they were short of cash.

Any thoughts?

the economics might not work out. if it brings in $30k a year, it's not worth the long days and exhaustion of keeping the service running.

i'd be comfortable paying about $10/yr for my account (since i don't use it a ton) but at that rate it's hard to make a living and justify the time and effort. notifo is really handy but it's not something many people want to pony up for.

Yes, exactly. As a consumer product the numbers would not add up, sadly. There are other factors on the publisher side that led to this; I'll be doing a more in-depth post mortem at some point.

So basically it's the business model that failed, rather than you personally. You had an idea that seemed good enough to spend time on but the market just wasn't there. No shame in that. Better luck next time!

Maybe there's a foreign HN'er who would manage the day-to-day hassle for you and for whom $Xk would be great money? Alternatively, sell (all or some of) it. Someone could well be keen to take it up if they think they can make it work.

Have you considered releasing the code as open source and turning the current notifo service into a paid service or something like that?

I'd happily contribute to the source.

I've given both notifo and notify.io a shot, but they both lacked a lot of features along with an extensible API.

It looks the only way to do it is to either extend something other than notify.io or write something like this from scratch.

Whatever your decision might be, I hope notifo will continue to exist under one form or another.

That's sad.

I've used Notifo to be notified about HN replies and I'd say it was very useful. GitHub integration was useful, but I've actually used it only once or twice.

What was a major turn-off to me is lack of GNU/Linux client and client API. Thanks to HTTP notifications, I were able to hack my own desktop client, but it was a kludge far from being convenient.

Notifo always seemed like a perfect acquisition for a number of the services it integrated with. I would have imagined Twitter snapping it up well before Bagcheck – it's a real shame no one ever bit.

Chad obviously knows his stuff, though. I'd imagine he's learned an enormous amount from the experience, and I'm looking forward to seeing where he goes next.

Good luck, Chad.

A while back, I hit a point where I felt like my startup wasn't going to make it. I needed a change. I took a job with an established startup, and about a year later, I was ready to move on and do my own thing again.

This is a marathon, not a sprint, and you have quite a while to make your mark.

Thanks for the work - I loved notifo and have it hooked up through Growl to ping me when important things happen. It pains me to need to search for a replacement when it worked so well, but after all, nothing is permanent. Good luck with your future endeavours.

Sorry to hear that Chad, I've already mentioned it to ya many times but keep working hard, lots of us out there recognize and appreciate the work you've put in (and enjoy reading your code). You'll make it one day even if it was not as easy as you imagined

FWIW, I'd have paid $50 p.a, I don't have many notifications setup but those that I do are important enough to actually prefer to pay for the service. Thanks team Notifo!

Anyone know of anything similar that works with Android?

Sad to see it go, but good on you for having a solid go at it. No shame at all. Something to be extremely proud of for seeing the entire life-cycle of a company from the inside...something you can't learn any other way.

Damn. Notifio was one of the more immediately awesome ideas I'd heard. Sad to see it wasn't able to become a thriving business.

Good luck Chad. Excited to see what you make next. High hopes.

One of the most inspiring comments on this post - 'Sad news. Congrats on what you achieved though. Much respect. Best wishes on your next project.'

Seriously, chad, Congrats. :)

I've been a heavy user of notifo myself, and will be sad to see the service go. Also agree that the notification was very professional and should set an example for other services.

sorry to hear, chad. i relied on the android app to send notifications from various things to my phone without sms.

anyone know of a free android alternative that uses c2dm?

A shame, I actually use this. Not as much as I'd want, but Github and Pingdom notifications are very very handy.

Any other simple Pingdom notification systems for Android?

Definitely sucks to have to shut something down. Best of luck in the future, and I'm sure having to do this will help then too.

It's sad to see Notifo shut down, but this is beginning to feel like 2000 all over again. There are simply too many startups.

I think there are too many startups that don't even try to charge users. If the word "free" is all over your web page, I'm immediately worried.

As we can see from this discussion, there are people who would gladly pay -- obvious question is how many and whether they would support the business.

Yes, but it's sad that they didn't even try to charge...

anyway we can get a post mortem, about what you learned, could of done better or different, things like this ?

Yes, I'm planning on doing this at some point, but it might be a while.

Sorry to hear this.

I'd like to know, though, how many users did the service get?

I really like this service; I use it everyday. I'll be sorry to see it go.

It was great while it lasted.

why dont you just ende the free service and start charging?

What killed the service for me was the lack of .io domain.

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