Friday.app is shutting down
friday.app
friday.app
You mention you had 100K users - I'm assuming those are paying users. Could they not keep using the product (especially if they've already onboarded)? Or are there significant ongoing costs beyond hosting?
You have a product bringing in $12 million per year (EDIT: I misread the profit remark originally, apologies to Kiro), and you can’t be bothered to do basic security updates?
> it's just a matter of time before it gets hacked but no big deal. If shit really hits the fan I will just shut it down.
You’re basically waiting to get hacked and your response plan is to just shut it down? And turn off $12 million in annual revenue because you didn’t feel like applying security updates?
Are you sure you mean $1 million per month in revenue? Because this doesn’t make any sense at all.
If this is true and accurate, you can at least see why this wouldn't apply to virtually anyone else running a high-profit software app, right? Especially not something like Friday.app which includes customer data.
Otherwise you're right. I simply can't be bothered and I don't even have access set up to the server on my current machine.
Me- Look a multi-gazillionaire!
Kiro - The profit is miniscule!
Me- They has spoken!
1M is thousand 1MM is million
https://gettingpeopleright.com/resources/what-does-m-and-mm-...
taking a guess that your app is an API wrapper of some kind? the $ you move is basically through your account from customer to service provider on each call and you charge some low flat rate per month for access?
That really depends on the product and how you built it. With platforms like Google App Engine or Heroku, there's no infrastructure to take care of and the only thing you have to patch/update is your own code. Customer support can be an issue, but some products are naturally self-service. Or cheap enough that there's no expectation of quality support.
I do think you need to plan for this sort of thing if you want to be able to walk away (even for a short vacation). If your natural inclination is to start with k8s, you're going to need ongoing devops work in perpetuity.
Definitely not. A company of that size with 100K paying users (so like $10M+ ARR) would be considered wildly successful. In their case it was probably a tiny tiny fraction of that.
Wyze did this recently with their subscription, which they let you pay as little as $0 for. They forced anyone who didn't subscribe onto a lower tier, which only stored still images instead of videos in the cloud.
I believe for that reason, for some founders it is, "you either die a hero or...."
If you use something for free, dont be surprised if it isnt there tomorrow.
Not needing to tend to a project you no longer find interesting (or view as a failure) is very liberating.
Would you be willing to keep the information you provided up as a statically hosted website so that the knowledge is not lost to the ether of the internet, accessible only via archive.org[1]?
[0] https://friday.app/anywhere
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20220107125929/https://friday.ap...
If I start another company, I will spend all my time focused on solving a very big pain-point with a few simple product.
With Friday, I wanted to keep the product simple, but the people we talked to always were talking about the "yet another tool problem" - so there was a desire to consolidate. How I interpreted this was that we needed to build the "suite" vs. spending all our time on one feature.
I could go on and on about what I would do differently, but I'm thankful for the opportunity and have learned a lot that will (hopefully) make me more effective in the future :)
This answer is so generic, but so apt. Everyone can throw around phrases like KISS or MVP or try to implement methodology like agile, but it's so hard to just identify _what_ you want (or need) to build.
We're looking at a major revamp/rewrite/refactor of our main product that previously had been built with the idea of being able to solve every problem our customers face. This decrepit, aging codebase has so many bandaid fixes for every conceivable "what if" scenario that it's just become unmaintainable.
If an existing app was doing a decent job, we didn't want to compete with them. The issue is that we ended up arriving in this "dead-zone" where we didn't replace an existing tool and pull budget from an existing category of tooling.
Then there's the "easy to integrate" side. Expect it to have to pass security reviews if it's SaaS of any kind and will touch any of our IP[1], and particularly detailed ones if it's very easy to "integrate with."
Azure AD Login was easy for us at "BigCo", but tied up several days of more than one grumpy security architecture team member's time with a variety of pen-tests that are required before they'll grant approval for it in our domain. That goes up exponentially to the impossible pretty quickly if it wants permissions to access things on our end via OAuth grants; even things that are typical (profile photo).
IT Architecture might get involved if there would be a need to make sure it worked with our systems, minimally to set up monitoring for it if we're making it available to a large amount of staff because if it goes down, we'll get a million calls into our 4-6 person (state-side by contractual/security requirements) Help Desk over something we can't do anything about and we're going to make sure we have a way to react to it when that happens. Someone's going to have to learn how to do any administrative/integration requirements, because configuration changes, we merge with companies somewhat frequently, and someone's going to have to make sure they know how to set it all back up, correctly, later -- just in case -- even when it doesn't make sense. Likely, BigCo want it to be used, so someone's going to have to write copy for an article for the company landing page explaining what it is, how it works and what problem it solves. There'll be other activities related to this when adoption doesn't take off. IT will have to dedicate some time to tracking usage to make sure we're getting ROI on it when the quarterlies come around and they have to justify every recurring expense, including the ones outside of the sticker price, all over again, and it's easy to trim off the add-on. Plus, they're often the ones who take the budget hit in the first place.
Legal/HR/The Business(tm) might get involved if employees can communicate, uninhibited, through it -- just like they do with E-Mail while they apply a flobbidy-jillion set of restrictions/disclaimers bits of nonsense around. We were not a Defense Contractor, we were just big, spread out and had a lot of employees. At scale, you end up with increasingly many who lack common sense, and a small fraction who still need to be warned about Nigerian Prince scams when one slips through. In a strange alteration of Rule 34, someone will upload porn to it or store porn on it if it is possible to store things on it. For the person who wants the product, it's going to be requiring phone calls, follow-ups, and general "going to bat for the vendor's product" against a hurricane-force headwind.
In fact, an add-on might be less likely to be purchased -- by BigCo, anyway -- because it doesn't do enough to pass the "Why do we need to tie up all of these people to bring this easy-to-integrate product into our environment when they can just use (some terrible excuse for a thing by comparison)?" The "we don't need that bad enough" answer is usually the case for Add Ons, and having a number of ancillary capabilities to distract with sometimes makes it more attractive to "the business" side of the above groups, which has the ability, often, to over-ride all of the rest of the "No"s going around.
At BigCo, an add-on requiring anything that the "good enough to somewhat OK" solution/solutions we already have kind-of sort-of covers doesn't stand much of a chance of being purchased. The one thing that can get in the door is the simple solution that solves a big problem, especially if there's nothing else out there that much of any part of it from any of the big vendors. I spear-headed a small handful of those. It has to be amazing and some reasonable combination of inexpensive, simple to maintain, highly available, non-critical if down (many, many things are unexpectedly critical).
[0] I worked there about a decade for 17 years, incidentally, most of it remote at an organization that was notoriously against remote work ... basically against a major service we enabled and often provided for other businesses. I worked as a software developer in the architecture organization working primarily on security-focused projects (figure that out) and had to go through this process enough to make my soul die a little.
[1] Basically, everything. At least, anything that would have a reason for the company to purchase it.
Thank you for your consideration.
The issue was that what I was hearing from prospects, customers, users signaled a bigger issue that could not be solved with a product tweak or two.
At the end of the day, I felt like the story I would need to tell a future investor (and new/existing employees) would increasingly become disconnected from the reality I was experiencing talking to customers/users.
I didn't feel at peace about it at all. I considered it to be a form of lying.
As I kept looking for new ways for us to grow, and what pivots might work, one of our existing investors said to me [paraphasing] "we'll invest more if you know what to do with it, but I [the investor] think you should start thinking about what your next thing is. We'll invest in that, but there comes a time you need to move on".
That chat was really impactful, they were happy to see us launch a product, get customers, and try to build something really amazing (and we kinda did).
The same team that created Ayvri (most of us) have come back together to create https://soundmind.co - we haven't taken investment yet, but the same investors are ready to back us when we do.
Did you have that kind of support from your investors @Lukethomas?
I think many of us are so scared of letting our investors down, but I am super happy with the character of our investors, who supported us in the best way possible.
Was it difficult to advertise specifically to this audience?
I've learned what Friday is at least 5 times and still can't remember.
Is all of the code being thrown away?
Kudos to the team for doing this the best way possible. Making a public announcement, refunding money, providing ample time to migrate is amazing.
Keep your heads up
Raising money turns a marathon into a sprint.
In short, I wanted to accelerate the pace of learning, because if I didn't, I would always kick myself for not stepping on the gas pedal.
I don't regret my decision either TBH.
Another is that I've randomly put credentials in the source code that I don't want leaked (again, my code is an ugly mess full of shortcuts and hacks). Yet another is that it would be impossible for someone to host themselves because I don't even understand it myself.
However, when you're closing shop dumping the code out there for others to figure out how to run, even if you can't help them set up an env from scratch still helps. I also think we need more spaghetti code out there, would help teach new developers how to maintain and refactor "legacy" code.
The credentials in source code thing, I thought by this time would have been a "solved" issue, but I guess some people still yolo it :). Credentials in source code, are the equivalent of password on post it notes ;)
While not the best security, post it notes are immune to hacking and really hard to leak without a home intrusion.
Credentials in source that won't be shared is a pretty efficient hack. Often it happens by mistake - eg. when you hard-code that credential into a bash script during testing when you're trying to curl a new API and then push it by mistake after a coworker asks for you to share your progress on a new branch for review.
I'd love to hear about these "non-obvious" reasons, because I can't say "I'm embarrassed by my code" sounds like a good excuse after convincing people to move to your platform, charging them a subscription for it, then kicking them off with only 60 days notice.
And "I don't think others could figure out how to host it" isn't a reason not to release. It costs nothing but a pretty insignificant amount of time to publish it, so even if it's "impossible" to re-host (and history would say it's not), I really don't see a reason not to let people try.
Sorry again for the confusion
I wish you no ill will, but goodness, talk about an anti-ad for your products.
Creds should be outside the SCM, and there are varying levels of "best practice" - vaults, environment variables of CI servers, text files with strict permissions outside the SCM, etc.
Your tips are true but not very helpful. I know it's bad or I wouldn't call it an ugly mess. I have better practices nowadays regarding credentials but all my projects always spiral out of control some way or another. If it's not this it's something else but I'm never proud of my code.
Freelance projects are bounded by NDA. And my personal projects are bounded by shame.
If I am worrying about credentials, code cleanliness, documentation etc I wouldn't have any time or energy to turn my stream of free flowing ideas into code.
The goal of OSS is not to show off your skills as some elite programmer.
I think the quality/bugginess isn't as much of a factor as the fact that the codebase was not written with the intention of becoming OSS. Things like lack of documentation, hard-coded secrets, inflexible hosting/deployment, etc. are difficult to account for after the fact. And if you ignore these things and just "throw code over the wall", then virtually no one will even look at your code, let alone use it. Kind of a waste of time just to indulge a few self-righteous commenters on some message board, if you ask me.
A lot of OSS software was written with the intention of being open-sourced, so many of the things that make open-sourcing a previously-closed repo difficult are considered upfront.
What's the goal? You make it sound like I have an obligation to do it for some utilitarian reasons, while in reality maybe one or two previous customers would use it while migrating to something else. It's crap software with much better OSS alternatives already.
It either dies with me or dies as an abandoned repo I need to be ashamed of.
Reimplementation saps alot of productivity from the economy.
Ethically, however, it doesn't really check out for me. If the software is a core part of your business and the (or one of the) primary reasons an investor has joined your business then it's at the very least a bait and switch to make such a decision without their involvement. To a big VC or private equity firm this may infuriate some but have little monetary impact; at a much smaller firm this could be highly damaging.
I'm also fairly certain that whatever harm comes from this decision would put the CEO in personal liability, potentially all the way up the decision chain.
Would it? Don't owners of companies general cede day-to-day business decisions to those running the company (i.e. the CEO)?
The issue is that shareholders literally own the property owned by the company, that's what it means to be a shareholder. Including intellectual property.
Announcing you are shutting down a company, and then, without board approval, the CEO giving away what assets remain... is super sketchy and probably illegal, probably stealing from the shareholders (or even more likely other creditors, if they exist), who would probably like to partially recoup their losses from sales of any remaining assets. What those assets are you are giving away are, say, a fleet of cars, or the intellectual property of source code, legally the same.
Imagine if a car service company announced it was shutting down, and then gave away all it's cars, instead of selling them in an orderly fashion and distributing profits to anyone who was owed money, including creditors and shareholders.
Given that with a company going out of business a lot of people are going to be losing money and wanting to get what they can out of any assets... the time to release as open source is really before you go out of business.
A noble thought, but then what? skeleton crew the business at a snails pace while still being unclear how to actually make money?
There have been many apps that have shut down in just the last few years, such as this and Woven, that I wonder if the money is not in such consumer (or even prosumer) apps like these and instead is in firmly B2B territory, where you can charge at least $100 a month, a market that would be a lot more sustainable user base than the fickle hands of B2C.
[0] https://getartemis.app (my app)
However I have no idea what Artemis actually is or does based on the homepage.
Does it only work with Google, or can I bring my own CalDAV? Is it an app, or a website? Does it cost anything? What does "signing up" actually entail? Is "forgetting to add breaks" some pain point I have that I didn't realize I had?
But to be honest, I don't think consumers will pay much for subscription software, while businesses will. I'm thinking of pivoting to B2B, a calendar API product that other companies can integrate into, something like that.
Someone is going to come in and own this space one day for sure. The need is always there.
Bandcamp was similarly private for 15 years after taking a few rounds of funding, but they eventually got acquired, and I guarantee you that's because those investors pushed for an exit while the projected future revenues of the company justified a higher valuation.
I myself worked for a company that was private for 12 years after seed funding and five rounds of VC capital. But eventually we were pushed into a (poorly conceived) acquisition.
The merry-go-round always stops. It's just a matter of time.
I wonder if there's an opensource version in the wild.
I wonder if the emphasis on task management is a contributing factor in it not taking off. Anecdotally, most places have a task management system already, switching systems is a heavy cost, and building a good one is actually a ton of work in the long term.
I'd be interested to see an app that focuses more on the culture aspects here – kudos, user profiles, events, search. Most companies don't have solutions for these, and bringing them into one place could be valuable.
Task management is extremely competitive and we didn't want to play in the space. With that being said, we viewed our job as an interface to "glue" the work together, no matter the source.
Glue and integrations with third-party systems are important, for sure, but were there any other jobs that customers were expecting more of, rather than this one?
This company only raised a reasonable amount of money (450k according to https://www.failory.com/interview/friday) and had a real product people were paying for.
When running a startup, it's natural to have unknowns, and for the most part, that's okay and to be expected.
But if you discover a new reality on the ground and continue to tell a different story, you are lying. I didn't want to do that.
This is a really interesting response to me - some peoples gut instinct is “keep going until you figure what that something is.”
Im curious if you could elaborate here about what story you found on the ground and what made you believe that you were quite far from building the right product?
I wish them luck on their next enterprises!
Instead of building on all of this work we keep blowing it up and reinventing things because VCs only want unicorn outcomes. As an example, YC startup graveyard could be full of flowers if these projects were open source and we had a better user driven funding model to keep them going after the business folds.
A lot.
We are raising generations that hail hashes representing urls to some origin server hosting a picture of a stylized horse (till the origin server doesn't shut down or changes the resource) over real estate, traditional stocks or even just luxury or anything you can touch or use.
We hail as heroes few dozens of crazy dudes putting all their life savings into meme stocks and picture them as heroes fighting against "the system".
We hail as heroes controversial entrepeneurs, generally sociopaths full of themselves, rather than hard working common people.
We are creating generations of ever more connected but lonely individuals desperately trying to find their place in the world, and somehow, we tell them that money is the answer for finding that place and purpose.
There is no shortage of people desperate for "making it" with ease and willing to take huge risks.
Go on reddits or boards related to personal finance, risky crypto speculation and meme stocks are discussed more than taxes, education investments or simple funds.
I think VC craziness is going to increase a lot and spread to places and countries where it wasn't the norm, that's up to you to decide whether it's good or not.
The bigger risk however isn't just that a company goes poof, but that the IP gets purchased for pennies on the dollar by some other company. This is an escape hatch that I don't think many investors would give up willingly.
Since it's a core feature but not a differentiator for their businesses I'd love to just make all of it open source and charge all of them to keep maintaining it but there's not an easy way to do that currently without devaluating it.
It's one if the reasons I avoid working for bootstrapped startups or startups with no-name VCs.
Only in recent times did pumping and dumping yet another B2B SaaS app become in vogue and usually by not tier-one funds. There is a reason the big, famous funds are oversubscribed and limited to big, famous institutional investors.**
** The same applies to other funds e.g. Hedge Funds. Only the very top consistently perform anywhere near their promises and the rest are ways for groups to try to get their foot in the door.
Top tier firms are actually the ones most guilty of it these days. They raise huge funds (thanks to Softbank) and attempt to buy their way into monopoly positions by selling dollars for 50 cents, manufacturing growth and then dumping the companies on the public market (these days through SPACs). Public markets are no different than private, it's the same group of individuals just further down the chain, with the same incentives to push up valuations knowing that stonks can only go up and when things go bad we'll be on the hook to rescue them, or if things are not catastrophic they'll just write off the losses or let main street investors on robinhood catch the falling knife.
I don't understand how that follows from the first statement. Can you explain?
I do not have the excess capital to throw at working on problems at the scale that I want to or in the segments that I'm interested in. Any money that I spent to work on these companies would be gambling with the future financial stability I can provide for my son. Providing him with the safety net necessary to pursue atypical career paths or interests is one of my top priorities.
VC funding is the only way that starting a company is possible for me. The existence of VC funding is the only reason I'm even ideating about these large problems. It's an equalizer that puts those of us without the same set of options at a level playing field.
Consumer apps can often get away with scaling ARR and slow incremental growth, but many of these are only feasible due to the existence of VC backed SaaS.
There's really no reason why all of this software needs to be cloud based, other than vendor lock in. For collaboration software we should have a way to self host or pay for managed hosts.
Aside from the code getting a license and legal audit, finding a trademark sponsor was important to them too so that someone doesn’t come along and re-commercialize their free and open work under the old brand.
On the flip side, this process is a lot of extra work to do in a very busy and risky time for a buisness. Efforts to open source may fail and I understand when people in charge choose to spend their time prioritizing their employee’s needs first, technology second. I can understand why the open source priority isn’t practical if the company doesn’t plan for this possibility ahead of time.
As long as you are not "distributing" it is absolutely fine to mix GPLv2, Apache License and proprietary code you got from some vendor all together. But as soon as you distribute this, it becomes messy.
And then come all the question on technical integrations, ego ("ugly code!!"), ...
People generally don't want to pay for things / fund things themselves.
For now on the internet this is the way, and IMO we as the users of the internet are somewhat the cause too.
With good will, we are here to help you or support your users community in the time to come.
Funding is getting tight. If you're not profitable or don't have a plan to be soon, it will be tough.
Funding is NOT tight -- it just doesn't last forever and investors eventually want returns.
With Fast, they raised $130m, had 400 employees, a run rate of $10m a month and made a whopping $600k in revenue. The staggering level of incompetence from every single person not just on that executive team, but of the firms who invested in Fast, is something we haven't seen in years.
Friday seems to be quite different. They did $2.3m in seed based on Crunchbase and that was in 2020 and never managed to find product market fit. That's a completely different problem than simply not being profitable.
Time will tell, but not looking great for anyone trying to raise rn.
Fast would not have received the funding to survive (if it received any additional funding it would have been predicated on probably cutting staff at least 60% if not more).
People are literally raising every single day. Funding might not be at the peak frothy levels it has been at before, but these are hardly bear times right now.