Comment by mgkimsal | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mgkimsal | Hacker News Reader

I rather question the customer service aspect of all this.

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.

Hi there. Chris here from Wildbit. I want to make sure I clarify some points.

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.

In addition to Chris's point, when we reached out to our customers about the decision, we gave them time to transition, and assistance in the transition plan.

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.

I still don't like what you did and I am sure you made plenty of developer/startup enthusiasts angry and that they would love to be in your shoes profitable. If it was profitable, it means it was sustainable, at least in short period of time. You didnt have to spend your time on it, you could hire a team and literally outsource entire project. You could easily sell it for 10x fold and score $1MM to use for you current or future projects. I assume your team worked hard on this, they should be rewarded monetary-wise as well. Not to mention if you had coming back customers, it means they liked or loved your service. Now you left them pissed. If you were concerned about lists (which is nice thing of you not just selling to spammers), and if a "large companies" truly approached you, I dont see a problem putting a statement in your sell paper how the new company will treat existing database of leads. I am sure if you would sell to Google, they wouldnt go wild and spam the heck out of each lead you had.

you could hire a team and literally outsource entire project. You could easily sell it for 10x fold and score $1MM to use for you current or future projects.

Way easier said than done.

Especially easily said by someone who has never hired a team, or sold a product to a bigco.

Funny thing is, selling to Google often also means shutting the product down anyways. For a product of this size, if Google had interest it would most likely be a talent acquisition more than product.

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.

closing down (killing) a self running, profit-generating, sustainable business (even if its MVP) that customers love and recurringly use is a good moral decision?

Whenever I have the same question as you, I stop and remember that a lot of people use "ethics" and "morality" interchangeably. If it doesn't make much sense with one word, try the other. :)

Do you think it's a good moral decision to continue taking your customers' money for something you will never improve much at all, because your heart's just not in it? I certainly don't think so.

thank you for the clarifications. those weren't as evident in my reading of the original post.

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.

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