Noteable.io is shutting down | Hacker News Reader

Noteable.io is shutting down

community.noteable.io

In a way I understand why, however I still am always perplexed when a "we are kaput" announcement drowns the message in praise for all the amazing super awesome they have done whilst not including a single character as to why, uh, perhaps the entire company/project/venture is ceasing.

To me, it only communicates that the issues were embarrassing, inconvenient, or otherwise do not shine a good light.

Am I reading too much into this, or does this kind of pithy announcement usually hide skeletons? Genuinely curious here.

No knowledge of the specifics here, but usually the underlying cause is the same: we are running out of money, the business model doesn't work, and we don't have enough time, ideas or both to try anything else - at least no with any confidence of success.

I wouldn't expect such a sudden death from "business plan just didn't work out" though. Take Docker for example. Curious. Competition perhaps?

Side-effects of higher interest rates are usually drying up of "easy money" (low-cost loans). Combined with the fact that VCs had a sudden shift (due to the loss of "easy money") and are now actually evaluating whether a startup is actually viable before committing funding to it, it is not surprising that investors demand existing companies that are no longer viable to orderly wind up in order to have some money than the real possibility of losing it all.

Docker is different: it has a name already so it can bleed a lot of money (à la Twitter while it was a public company) and there is generally a significant holding in large enterprises. I'm guessing that Notable didn't have significant notable enterprises using it that will make investors more relaxed with their red sheets.

You are assuming it is sudden on the inside, because it was looks that way from the outside. It usually isn't.

Yeah: what's the alternative?

September, 2023 -- Notable.io announces one of its primary investors is pulling out.

October, 2023 -- Notable.io announces it failed to raise as much as it hoped for in its latest fundraising round.

November, 2023 -- Notable.io announces "Oh uh, we're running out of money. Someone come invest in us, quick!"

December, 2023 -- Notable.io is shutting down.

It's hard to accept something you've poured your life into and had such high hopes for isn't working out. This is why every company that gets bought has an optimistic blog post talking about how they can finally get things done with the support of the acquiring company. They really believe it. They just proved it's nonviable, and they still believe they'll be able to keep trying.

It's not accurate that every company that is acquired is non-viable. For example sometimes it's more about timelines because building your viable business into a different kind of business will take a lot longer than you are up for. Sometimes it's because the principals are more interested in doing something else, etc.

Is it sudden? Most business aren’t advertising the fact they’re slowly failing.

> To me, it only communicates that the issues were embarrassing, inconvenient, or otherwise do not shine a good light.

> Am I reading too much into this, or does this kind of pithy announcement usually hide skeletons? Genuinely curious here.

This line of thinking bothers me. It reads as if you feel like you're owed something from the company. Why does it matter?

If it's fundraising issues, lack of product market fit, founder disputes, team member stole the entire bank account, the end result is the same. They can't run the business. As long as there's a clear message and a path to EOL for active customers, what possible reason could help?

To me, it actually highlights the praise of the team and the products they built together instead of focusing on the details of why they're no longer operable. And reading the other threads here, they did a great job but there simply wasn't large enough captive market.

> It reads as if you feel like you're owed something from the company. Why does it matter?

You paid them money and trusted them with your data. Any usage on your part is an investment in the company. Of course you would feel entitled to know why they are ceasing effective immediately

You paid them money. You got a service. If you bought groceries from a grocery store every week, and one well you showed up to find they were closed, would you feel like you were owed an explanation?

Yes. But only because the usual routine is worth something to me, and i would be angry about a change that is forced upon me. Getting an explanation is a way to release that anger.

Annoyed I’d understand, but angry? Other people aren’t required to help maintain your routine.

You put in data. They owe you data back.

If you put money in the bank, do you expect to get it back?

yes, agreed.... but we're talking about being owed an explanation - i think you missed that part of this thread.

> Any usage on your part is an investment in the company. Of course you would feel entitled to know why they are ceasing effective immediately

Going with the Steelman path - This is true if I sincerely believed in the company, likely promoted them to others, and was emotionally invested. I definitely would want one. As a shareholder, I would demand one.

Anyway, based on the OP's tone of this thread, I doubt they were emotionally invested let alone a paying customer - but assumptions.

You sure didn't steelman the OP.

They said the explanation is suspicious. That doesn't mean they feel like they are personally owed an explanation.

Was steelmanning what I quoted which was not the OP.

Yes. Which is bad.

Wait... Why?

The bad part was not steelmanning the OP even a tiny bit, when you're fully familiar with the idea and expectation.

Ah got it. You've got a weird requirement for steelman arguments.

That it's rude to steelman one person while taking the worst interpretation of another person? I don't think that's weird.

This best describes my feeling.

“Just because they left a comment saying the explanation was suspicious, nobody would reasonably infer they feel entitled to an explanation.”

Uh-huh

What doesn't make sense about that?

Even if you don't owe me any explanation, if you freely give me a bad one I'm allowed to say there's something weird going on. Especially if you chose to make a fully public post about it.

Read the comment again. "perplexed" "It only communicates" "Am I reading too much into this" "curious". I don't see any implication of being owed more. It's a criticism that the post is not leaving the message that is intended.

It's not the same, but it reminds me of the quote: My "Not involved in human trafficking" T-shirt has people asking a lot of questions already answered by my shirt.

Not an investment, an exchange of goods and services.

I’m not owed explanation if my local gas station closes down and I bought a tank of gas from them the day before.

A subscription is different from a one-off exchange. The expectation is for it to continue.

Tell that to my local newspaper. Most things come to an end at some point.

I would feel like the local newspaper should tell me why they are shutting down, if it wasn't already obvious because they're a newspaper. Wouldn't you?

That's what we're talking about here, not forcing them to stay up somehow.

We’re just curious about what happened and we think we could learn from it maybe — was it product market fit, was it unit economics. Lessons in there!! So it would be cool to see more detailed info.

> Why does it matter?

It matters a lot if the team goes on to found some other product that will go away in 3 years.

> It matters a lot if the team goes on to found some other product that will go away in 3 years.

You follow team members' track records and avoid products based on who is there?

Just trying to point out how unrealistic this logic actually plays out. It seems like in general, you'll want to avoid startups or companies less than 5 years old.

I don't avoid startup/business less than 5 years old neither I avoid startup where only a few lower members of failed startup moved there.

I avoid doing business with startup founded by a majority team of a failed startup.

I will do business or avoid doing business with companies based on leadership reputation, yes.

You’re not entitled to see the skeletons. The people shutting down their business owe their customers a notice. They don’t owe the world an exposé of their (possible) flaws.

A business can fail just because it’s the wrong time or they were unlucky or many other reasons. If the issues were embarrassing? They don’t owe you those details.

They're not asking to see the skeletons. They're trying to figure out if skeletons actually are likely, or if the phrasing is motivated by some weird fear of saying the business model failed and ran out of money. And it's more about this type of announcement in general than this specific business.

Right. Maybe the reason they failed is they priced their product too low. Maybe they were too altruistic.

It would be nice to know why some businesses succeed while others fail. If I knew that I guess I would be rich.

Having been around when one of these was written, it could be:

- this is a very difficult time emotionally for the author, so they aren’t thinking entirely rationally

- the author is exhausted

- the author is ashamed/embarrassed about having lost money for all their friends and family

- they don’t want to expose themselves to liability

- the message was vetted by a risk averse lawyer, aka a lawyer

- the message has to satisfy a bunch of different audiences, so it is generic

- it is almost an afterthought amongst all the other stuff that has to get done shutting down the business

And most importantly, they may not explain why the business failed because they don’t really know. If they knew why they didn’t find product market fit, the business wouldn’t have failed.

If they truly know why they failed, that would be valuable information, which they are not required to share with anybody. If you know why something fails it is the mirror image of why something succeeds. Valuable information.

I followed this company since there beginnings out of Netflix. The original founder Michelle Ufford left with no detail and no explanation. I'll bet there's more to dig into.

Three weeks notice with a deadline right after the New Year holidays..

Ouch, that's not a landing it's a crash.

I think companies in this "data analytics platform but with LLM integration" space are going to struggle in the next few years. The pain points of analytics are completely different than traditional software engineering, and things that LLMs help the most with (writing boilerplate code, bouncing between different frameworks, handling tests and docs) aren't serious issues in analytics work. I use copilot religiously for webdev work but find it completely useless for analytics.

Can you elucidate why specifically?

I'm imagining something like an GPT-4 agent that has connections to your Databricks, Snowflake, Salesforce, etc.

You ask it a question and then it iteratively queries your data and produces some an answer/some code/ a graph. Or it generates a plan that you can edit a bit and then it executes.

That sounds like it would be pretty useful copilot for me? I'm not very familiar with the intricacies of analytics work though.

1st May or 5th Jan?

I think it's real. When I sign into my account, kernels don't run. Noteable is one of a couple of realtime collaborative Jupyter notebook environments, including Deepnote and Cocalc (my site). I know from chatting with Kyle Kelley earlier this year that they were investing strongly in ChatGPT integration, but evidently this didn't fully ship, since their "Upgrade to Pro" dialog says "COMING SOON: NoteableAI!" in bold. Kyle regularly posted a lot of exciting work they were doing on AI integration on Twitter (e.g., [1]).

[1] https://twitter.com/KyleRayKelley/status/1727430546354233763

Grandparent asked for clarification about the date format, currently article asks to export data before 1/5/24. I don’t think they wanted to suggest it’s not real.

Your parent is refering to the reference of "1/5/24" in the post which is the date until which you can download data.

Most of the world would that interpret as 1st May 2024, some parts of the world might call it 1st January 2024. It's not entirely clear what's meant here.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_format_by_country

https://xkcd.com/1179/

In 1988 :cry:

This is why we can’t have good things.

Its an American company so I would assume January 5th. An important date like this should be more explicit.

I thought it was this (https://noteable.edina.ac.uk/) Noteable for a minute. They two similar services in a similar space with a similar name.

And I was confusing it with https://notable.app/

Effective immediately is surprising. Why such a sudden shutdown?

Wonder if they were really cutting it close with funding, were in talks to raise another round, and then the conversations all fell through.

Interesting this in comparison to Signal's recent post about their finances. An honest organization that actually cares about providing value to its customers would be able to make a frank appeal about the situation the company is in, in hopes that it could turn around. But a company whose real customers are VC has to keep up the act that everything's fine even if it isn't.

When push comes to shove inexperienced, proud or slightly arrogant leadership can make the silliest of mistakes, such as, not appealing to the community.

Signal publishing detailed finances is part of their brand. It's not advantageous for most companies to do that because if there's signs of trouble, everyone takes it as a sign to get the hell out of there and makes a troubled situation confirmed death.

Exactly, because most companies like it or not don't have "honesty" as a core value.

Shutdowns are rarely sudden. Companies aren’t going to be public about their financial struggles unless they’re legally obligated to do so. I imagine that Notable have been facing the same slowing investor interest and increased interest rates that most of has for the better part of at least a year.

So it’s likely that the only sudden thing about this, is that they now failed to secure anymore money after a long struggle. Some companies may give customers a little longer to get off the sinking ship, but if you’re just looking at the cost, it probably wouldn’t make much sense to do so instead of running on fumes (and hope) for as long as possible.

Sucks for the employees though.

But it's not immediately, they say January 5th

The service is already shut down, except to let you export.

This is unfortunate. I find it interesting, there did not seem to enough revenue to shink business to ride through the tough market riding on existing revenue only...

This is why I love SaaS based of Open Source projects a lot - even if things do not work out and company has to shut down, customers may have more options.

Reddit comment from a Notable employee:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPTPro/comments/18jbj32/does_an...

TLDR: market conditions not conducive to their business at this time. (Ed: founding team probably wants to quickly pivot to something else, not take the time to for a sale)

Brutal news, the Graphistry team would point to Noteable internally as an example of good execution on notebooks-as-a-service

For folks impacted, we've been pursuing a similar-but-different product & technology vision for making data analysis easier, and may have relevant openings for specific staff:

* Graphistry side - visual graph AI: connecting GPUs in the cloud to GPUs in the browser, automating data science for tricky data, ... . We helped make Apache Arrow a thing by bringing it to the web for most new visual analytic frameworks, helped start the GPU data frame movement (led to Nvidia RAPIDS), and are on the next generation of technologies here (GNNs, another 100X in viz scale, ...) and use cases (global supply chains, cybersecurity, finance, misinfo, fraud ...) . Biggest opening in WebGL/infoviz, and then in AI / security / federal solutions.

* New - Louie.AI conversational analytics platform: Flipping the data analysis default from Python/SQL/etc in today's notebooks => natural language for the default case . Basically making it so anyone can use all the cool stuff above, with early customers again in supply chain, fraud, cyber, gov disaster management, etc. Openings on core team, GIS, AI solutions, marketing, etc, mix of part-time & full-time

More info @ https://www.graphistry.com/careers , and easiest is to just chat

Must be hard to be in such a position.

I've been using Jupyter to teach Python and Pandas to a lot of companies over the years, and Noteable made it so much nicer and easier. I'm very sad to see them shutting down, but I have to assume they would have kept going if they could.

Cool. How about you open source the application? Let the community take over if they want to.

Would the project financially make sense for an indie developer or developers to continue building?

What comes to my mind is this rhetorical question:

How a service with such a wonderful home page suddenly die?

Beautiful pages alone don't bring money. Sometimes ugly pages bring money. It's whacky.

Bummer! Shame I just heard about it today. It looked decent; I might have used it.

a Series-A company failing is not news let alone noteable...

But... they have no-code AND AI! And like 5 awards from... someone... right on their front page! Maybe they needed to add more bullshit.

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