Why we shut down a product that was $75,000/year profitable
wildbit.com
wildbit.com
However, the true way to value profitability is to take a more financial perspective (financial being different than accounting). A financial perspective would value the opportunity cost of working on this application compared to working on another application. If the team spent 10 hours a week on the application, and those 10 hours a week could grow their other products by more than $75,000 a year, then of course the application isn't profitable. It's actually losing money.
Another way to look at its profitability is to look at it from an operational standpoint. The employees on the team would be consider a fixed cost (yes, they could hire more people, but that just changes the fixed cost). The limited resource for this particular fixed cost is time, and from their article I can assume that their time was maximized (working as many hours a week as they wanted to). Operational theory says when a fixed cost is at its maximum utilization, higher marginal profitability items should be prioritized. Basically, they are better off working on other items if they don't want to work more hours.
If it was profiting @ 75K a year, thats half a designer, half a marketer and half a programmer for a year. Hire them in, and let them do what they like with it for 6 months. Get interns and let them have a play with it if you want to give some kids a chance.
It's usually a bad idea to shut down a profit center, unless it truly is unsustainable. @75K this was doing well and IMO should not have been shut down.
My usual strategy works well here: Hire in @min wage, with a huge bonus linked to new subs.
Depending on the size of the company it might just make a great graduate / junior dev recruitment program. Take them on with a probationary period and watch how well they do with the sideline gig. If they turn the code to spaghetti within months then you probably don't want them working on the core business. The last one through the mill becomes supervisor for the next one.
The only potential issue with this strategy is damaging the brand name of the consulting company. I'm not entirely convinced that this is really an issue.
"Thanks for commenting. You are spot on, we weren't profitable in many other ways. The time we were spending on Newsberry could, and does, bring more profitability on our other products. In our opinion at Wildbit, half of an anything is not worth something. We don't build half-projects, and we don't put interns to work on them. But for many, it's hard to turn away $75/year."
Totally doesn't make any sense. Idealist for sure.
Not all good decisions are based in objective reality. Never underestimate a gut feeling.
After all, something like a mailing list service requires lots of ongoing care if it's to be any good (deliverability, etc).
It's not idealist, as you say, to shut down a project that is a time and energy suck. It's idealist to think a busy company with 2 very successful, well-loved projects should "devote a day a week" to a project that isn't nearly as profitable as the others, and which nobody really enjoys working on to boot.
Great story, guys. Let's see more of these.
Eventually, a year later, the overtaxed sales staff were punted the job. The sales guys were fantastic at sales and very personable, but there's a direct conflict of interest between sales and support contracts, especially when they don't understand the cost of supplying it.
All because the only things the CEO could see were his pet project, the projected sales figure, and any possible way to vacuum money into his pocket (he owned 2/3rds the company, so its long term health was actually in his interest...)
I'm not sure I'd dig my electric company cutting off my electric service just because they felt they could be more profitable somewhere else and didn't "believe" in my service anymore. Service that I've paid for, come to rely on, and have integrated in to my business.
Selling this or partnering with another company to transition accounts over to them would have been better. Maybe they did that and didn't mention it in the article (or I missed it).
Yeah, I get it. You're entrepreneurs and want to "have passion" about what you do. But.. WTF - people are paying you for something that they obviously want, and you just shut the accounts down - with or without notice, I don't really care. How do I feel now about postmark? Will you still have passion for it in 15 months, or will you decide beanstalk is more profitable, and shutdown postmark? regardless of what is said now, making decision like this is emotional (read the language of the post) - emotions will change next year.
"Selling would have involved a lot of effort and time, and we just needed to focus on our products that were growing. " Don't you think the existing paying customer deserved that bit of respect for you to put the effort in to selling, and ensuring their continued success as well?
Puzzling a best - disconcerting to say the least.
EDIT: http://help.newsberry.com/kb/subscribers/transferring-subscr...
There's a help link to transition to campaign monitor. Fine that's there, but the language of the post still seemed to ignore the needs of the existing users, and focused their decision solely on the feelings of the people running the show. Let's hope they always feel positive about postmark, otherwise you'll be seeing 'transition from postmark to xxxxx' in their help pages in the next year or two.
A big reason we waited so long to shut it down was leaving our customers stranded. Even at such low revenue, we owed everything to them for allowing us to get our first product off of the ground and finding value in our service for so many years. It was a VERY difficult decision.
We did not make a move until we had a very good transition process for all of our customers. We set up a partnership with Campaign Monitor so each customer could easily migrate their lists and avoid any downtime in sending emails. Sure, it is a pain to export and import lists, but there are many good options out there such as Campaign Monitor. If your electric company shut off your service you would surely be screwed, not really the same case here.
Regarding Postmark, this should make you feel even more confident about it. We've seen amazing growth and our team is so passionate about Postmark that we decided it was worth giving up profits on Newsberry to make it even better. That says a lot about our commitment to our other products and our focus as a team.
In the history of Wildbit there were many times when we could have just added a few employees to keep profits going in one area while we worked on something else. A perfect example is when we decided to drop consulting to focus on products. We could have kept it going along side of products, but focus is everything in business if you want to create something that people really love and enjoy to use.
I didn't personally speak to every customer, but many of the customers were understanding and in some cases, very supportive of the decision. The produce hadn't gotten new features or much more than maintenance in over a year. They appreciated our honesty and perhaps more importantly, our empathy for the situation we ultimately created for them.
Way easier said than done.
Outsourcing an entire product like this is a pipe dream. It would also likely screw over their customers, who may then pass word around that they were douchebags for doing it.
I think they handled it well, and very morally.
i understand this was no easy decision, but I do feel the original post was far more about your emotional decisions behind it, and not enough about the existing paying customer perspective.
thank you again.
If I was a Microecon professor with a 101 class coming up, I know I'd have this article spiked and ready to use for an upcoming semester.
In this case it is arguably a scale problem. You have the company being only able to concentrate on one thing at a time, and even though the product is profitable with NPV > 0, there are better projects out there to take with an even bigger NPV, even if the rate of return might be reduced.
It's kind of like you have a block of land, do you want to setup a park that charges money to enter or build a skyscraper? The park has a 200% rate of return and the skyscraper only 15%.
When you start a service and sign on customers, you take on a responsibility to keep that service going. Even if that means selling it or passing it on when you can't carry the torch yourself.
Isn't that what they are doing with their CampaignMonitor partnership?
Seems this company did more for their customers than most do. They didn't just shut the doors one day. They didn't lock in the user data and make it impossible to get. They made one of the toughest decisions to make - shutting a mildly profitable service. It's easier to shut it down if it's losing money.
You have a responsibility to your employees and anyone else that works for the company to do not harm their livelihood. Running a service that continues to waste money can eventually put the company out of business.
One of my former coworkers helped build a ridiculous iPhone ringtone app a few years ago that STILL generates positive cashflow, and profited several 100k. This was done strictly through marketing. There are plenty of ways to grow a product, but these guys didn't have the know-how or wherewithal to do it for an already profitable product.
A real business person would have taken that $75k/yr and figured out a way to grow it, through marketing, by pounding the pavement, etc. Most startups are cash flow negative, and will die in a year and yet this company generating profits and weren't able to make it grow? They gave up way too easily, and like people said, it's because they got bored of it. That reeks of arrogance, sorry to say, being bored of $75k/yr.
Hopefully your current products are profitable, so that this isn't a lesson that comes back to haunt you later on. But as other people said, I also hope this doesn't mean that your current customers have to look forward to their product being closed down prematurely because your company got bored of it as well.
"We can devote $x resources on XYZ and make $75k profit, and spend more time and money to figure out how to grow it, or we can spend that $x resources on ABC, make more than $75k from that resource expenditure, and not have to invest more time/money to figure out how to grow ABC because it's already growing (either because we figured it out or we'll figure it out along the way)."
Yes there are plenty of ways to grow a product, but how much time/energy do you justify on learning/testing when you've already got other products that are more profitable and growing?
That said, the original post still focused too much on the feelings of the devs/peeps involved and didn't seem to address things from their customers' perspective. They addressed that in another reply to my earlier post, but it still set a bad tone to me off the bat.
But balking at spending effort to maintain a $75k/yr business doesn't seem "hungry" enough to me. They tried to killing off the business and dropped their price, and instead they doubled the number of users. What??? How much more of a clue do they need that they really have a viable product here?
Any businessperson worth their salt would take this and start figuring out a way to build on it. What about get an MBA intern from Wharton and give them the project of figuring out how to grow the business? Hire a real entrepreneur and tell them if they can grow the business, you'd split the profits 50/50 with them.
I mean, come on. There's a real solid base there of people who were willing to pay for their service. The BEST solution was to shut it down? I can't believe it.
The truth is from what I can gather and what this posts says, they're very passionate people. They don't want their name attached to a half-baked product. Nor do they want to deal with it anymore. It makes a lot of businesses sense to deal with things they ARE passionate about. $75k is small change. They don't need the hassle.
I'd call the entire premise a success (not Newsberry per se, but in light of other product development.) Great recognition of where the product was going and where limited resources should be directed.
Also, they have a product called Postmark in the same space, Why create a competitor for yourself?
It's their decision to sell or not. They did right by their existing customers in first making an honest go of the business, then cutting the price when that didn't work, and then getting a transition plan for closing it when the lower price brought too many low quality (ie: borderline spammer) customers.
You can have an opinion if that's right or not, but ultimately its their decision.
I understand that it's out of their hands once they sell it but if somebody made a good offer to buy the piece of tech then I (emphasis on the "I") would accept. The actions of the buyer doesn't dent their reputation IMHO as its no longer their product.
They're dramatically underestimating how much the average user dislikes change. It doesn't matter if Campaign Monitor is better -- some of your users would have gladly stuck with the old way simply because it's the old way, and they were probably pissed they had to learn something new.
Letting the product coast isn't cheating your users. It's simply offering them one more option.
This is what drives me nuts about the "I bootstrapped my company to profitability and success!" blog posts, because in most instances, the owner is making $50K/year and can't afford to hire anyone else.
I'd be interested in seeing what their top line numbers looked like, as that'd give an indicator of their overall market penetration, and true success.
This is why companies that do $750MM in revenue per year, but report an annual loss are still hugely successful, because $750MM is a ton of money!
Perhaps it could have been similar to this recent story: http://www.softwarebyrob.com/2012/01/25/the-inside-story-of-...
It would be interesting to here some ex-customer perspectives on this.
Here's the thing about the comments on this article, here on HN: of the people saying it was a mistake, that the article was misleading, etc, etc: How many of them have a profitable business with a team of any size, and multiple products?
That's the hidden problem with HN: with a few notable exceptions, everybody here is an Monday morning quarterback.
There is NOTHING more draining than to keep a product running "because it's just profitable enough." Or worse, because you feel guilty about shutting it down, because you feel like you're going to let down your customers.
There's nothing more divisive than a redheaded stepchild product.
There's nothing more wasteful than a distraction to you & your team.
Running 2 products is not simply double the work than running 1. Running 3 products is not simply 50% more than running 2.
When one runs a successful business oneself, one knows this implicitly.
But when you haven't, then you are likely to look at this kind of story and go "WTF? They just threw away $75k/year? But they could have spent 1 day a week on fixing it and making it more profitable! They could have hired a part-time designer!"
But this is just a lament wrapped up in logical, impartial language - but still a lament, which is really saying "WTF? I could use $75k/year! How could they possibly throw that away? WASTEFUL. SHAMEFUL."
Which is, really, totally understandable. Until you run a business of this scale, it's hard to imagine how $75k/yr in profit could be a millstone around your neck instead of something to celebrate. However, that does not good business advice make, and one must always consider the source & experience of the person dispensing it.
But you're right that I don't run a business with >$100k in profits, so I suppose I very well might just not get it.
Perhaps I should grow a thicker skin, but as a father of two redhead children I found the use of the expression "redhead stepchild" offensive. Mostly because I'd hate them to read something like that and think that there is something wrong with them.
I know it's meant to be a funny expression, and it's cool to make fun of redheads and all (isn't it great to find a minority that is ok to publicly ridicule without having to think about issues like racism), but perhaps the joke is getting not funny anymore...
or maybe I need to have a coffee and lighten up?
1. Lots of people think redheads are sexy.
2. The implication of "redheaded stepchild" is that "it's obviously not your kid" or possibly even a bastard.
3. I'm fat, and a Rails developer, and I don't get my knickers in a twist every time somebody makes the "fat models" metaphor about good MVC design.
No offense, but your sensitivity to your kids' redheadedness is far more likely to make them think it's a bad thing than some random colloquial phrase.
I guess I must have misnderstood the colloquialism as I read it as similar humor to this http://smh.drive.com.au/governments-dont-be-a-dickhead-campa...
You are right, the "redheaded" part of the phrase is simply meant to imply the child is obviously not a legitimate child of the parent (who is assumed to be a non-redhead). So I was way off base, my apologies.
That's what you get for posting immediately after learning your flight has been delayed two hours :-(
The point of "redheaded stepchild" is that nobody loves it cuz it's not THEIR baby. Making it the perfect metaphor for this product. :)
If you're unwilling to receive feedback (be it right or wrong), why write the article in the first place?
Wildbit already made the decision. It's already happening. They've been working on it for months and months. I don't think they care what random people on the internet have to say, either good or ill.
Why write, then? To draw back the curtain a little on their business, and no doubt also for some exposure. Which has totally worked for them.
I am writing for the benefit of the other people reading, who would only otherwise see the "zomg waste!" responses and not understand where those reactions are coming from… e.g. a place verrry different from the place where the people live who made the decision. Unlike the vast majority of the commenters, my husband and I run a product business very much like Wildbit's, just a little bit younger. And we know them. So I want to challenge more HNers to think beyond the obvious, safe opinion ("they shouldn't have shut it down! money!") and understand what it's really like, what they're missing from their imagined scenario.
And with that said, I'd like to invite you to consider the meaning of "feedback." Is anyone ever excited to get "feedback"? Do people do things, and write, in order to "get feedback"? That is a rather sad, limited view of human endeavor.
HN is a kind of echo chamber, with most people expressing the same (tired, accepted, safe) opinions & receiving plaudits and upvotes in return. That sounds more like the second definition of "feedback" to me -- the return of a fraction of the output signal.
NOTE TO SELF: New startup idea: Create a Craigslist for no-longer-wanted, about-to-be-defunct startups. Woot!
NOTE TO SELF: Come up with another startup idea! :(
oh shit :/
I did not know about that. Thanks.