Grove.io shutting down
grove.io
grove.io
That said, no hard feelings. It's hard out there. I've never tried to run a company, so I can't judge.
With something like a business tool though I want something that is going to be around for the long term and it would be a factor on further products she creates.
From experience I know a startup is hard and things don't always go to plan so I can sympathise there, just that when choosing tools for business stability is a factor.
As a community we praise people for trying, then when it fails we pillory them? A dick move, sir.
You say "supposedly" but you just assumed it was "valid". So without evidence or context, you took him at face value and now assume bad things about the person in question. That's why it's a dick move.
I think the guy is really just telling facts. Unfortunately, it means that the next project may have users worrying about when it'll be shut down. (There were actually comments to that affect when grove was announced on HN).
Also, I think the underlying issue here is that none of those services cost anything to run, so they seem to have been shutdown because of other factors - perhaps a lack of ability to see things through.
pil·lo·ry [pil-uh-ree] noun
a wooden framework erected on a post, with holes for securing
the head and hands, formerly used to expose an offender to public
derision.
I have no opinion on this specific startup. Perhaps they've provided enough time to migrate; that's for their paying customers to judge. But it's naive to think failures doesn't affect your reputation. It does, and it should. Do you really think savvy users won't take your track record into account when deciding whether to use your service? It goes against their interests, and nothing is more darwinian than a startup.
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Here in silicon valley we say that failure is ok. And yet accountability is also good. There's a tension here.
Perhaps failed startups are fine for investors, who might have diversified into many different vehicles. They're more problematic for customers who rely on a product. And paradoxically, the closer a startup gets to solving a hair-on-fire problem, the more careful they need to be about how they treat their customers on the way out.
Even if investors claim failure is ok, is that always the case? I suspect past track record does play a role somehow, even if it's subtle and hidden behind the scenes.
Even if failure is sometimes ok, there are failures and there are failures. A lot depends on how the wrap-up was carried out, and how people feel about it.
When startups are few and creation is to be encouraged, failure can be ignored. When startups are plentiful and failure starts to be taken for granted, perhaps it's time to emphasize accountability.
The grandparent is the opposite of what this community is about.
And attaching their name to it is worse. Saying "I'm starting to not trust this startup" would have been much more acceptable in my opinion.
It gives me little new knowledge, and makes the move seem sudden and strange. From the outside, Grove looks quite successful.
A simple "we only had 20 paying customers and we think SaaS IRC doesn't work for reason X" would be fine. That she hasn't said that, to me implies there is something else going on.
Hope she's OK!
(uber, taskrabbit notwithstanding..)
heh. can someone recommend an alternative that also supports connecting via standard IRC protocol?
I'm sure she would have loved to have all of her projects succeed.
Grove.io is a high quality service. We love using it at Leftronic and are very sad to read this news. I wish Leah and her team the best.
It is in no way a shot at Leah or her work. It's just a recognition of history.
He had a chance to edit his post to better reflect his position, but chose not to take it. I wish he had.
(And to complete this, lets not forget that Rayne is also a person who just made a mistake. It is the action which is bad, not the person).
I don't see how this is any different than picking up women and telling them you think they're serious girlfriend material in a context (business services) where that's the expected standard, then dropping them for the new hot thing.
Why is it suddenly acceptable to do this just because they called themselves a startup?
Why do you assume the worst of this company? The rest of your statements in this thread are really aggressive, and rely on very negative assumptions, which do not seem to have a basis in fact.
Because that's what happened to her last six projects?
Are you completely incapable of inductive reasoning or are you being obtuse so that you can make the total unaccountability of SV founders a moral crusade?
> "..our team has moved on to other projects.."
So, unprofitable, or just not the next Facebook? Is there really no one that is happy to keep the service ticking along?
I feel like there is a pretty significant problem with tech startups, where everyone is so busy trying to be the next big thing, that everything else is dropped and abandoned in that pursuit.
The abandonment feeds into the consumer mistrust and makes it that much harder to bootstrap the next company.
A good example of an industry that was utterly destroyed by a crisis of consumer confidence was the video game industry.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_video_game_crash...
>Revenues that had peaked at around $3.2 billion in 1983,[1] fell to around $100 million by 1985 (a drop of almost 97 percent).
It would be extremely unwise to believe the startup industry couldn't be subject to the same problem. VCs are getting uncomfortable with the valuations, the constant buyouts and abandonment are burning out consumers.
Were I not working on a startup of my own, I'd be happy to take upon somebody's profitable but small red-headed stepchild business.
1) why not open source the project?
2) why not look for someone to take it over and run it?
I also have a hard time seeing how something like this could be at the very least not break-even (unless they had less than 10 paying customers or something).
Better put: are you a paying customer? If not, then most likely other potential customers are unaware.
There is a demand for this type of service. Real-time chat is in extremely high demand still. Chat was the number one requested feature a "build-you-own" social network startup I worked at a handful of years ago even before Facebook added their chat.
If they're shutting it down because it isn't sustainable, that's fine, I don't expect them to run the service as a charity (we have freenode for that!) - but that doesn't seem to be the case.
Moving our team off of Grove was a bigger pain then dealing with the sporadic mini-outages so we put up with it longer then smaller teams or most companies. We really liked the feature set but just needed the product to be more stable. The writing has been on the wall for a few months as doing a twitter search will show the lack of a response for a few months now.
I'll hack on it a bit more tonight, but it shouldn't be too difficult to replicate what Grove.io does.
Hi,
Thanks for your interest in Grove.
Unfortunately we won't be open sourcing the code due to the time and effort it would take to prepare and maintain it.
Thanks for understanding,
Leah
Not that I'm saying they have to release it (I respect their right to do whatever they want with their own work), but as far as reasons to not release something, that's pretty weak.
great work.
* run their own IRC server
* run a XMPP server (cough openfire)
* Sign up for another service that has more features (Campfire or Hipchat)
Not to be mean, but the pricing on grove.io is stupid for what they offer. I run a XMPP server at work and costs us nothing for the basics, which is group chat and private chat. They could have offered this for far cheaper and maybe they would be alive now... and by cheaper I mean a flat fee, no slot pricing for a hosted solution. IRC has low overhead so really, offer IRC+ features for dirt cheap and people will sign up. Hell, if they wanted a higher end one time fees, they knock out a self hosted solution with high end support on a yearly support contract.
If the features are that good for your IRC based service, knock it down to $5/mo unlimited users and get a user base going, find out what they want and then add on value addon features based on that feedback. If you can't offer the service for that cheap, then you have too much overhead (bodies).
Just because anyone can do it, doesn't mean everyone wants to, even (or especially) when you're a highly tech-centric organisation.
It sounds like it costs at least 1 server, plus your time. Those are not free.
I've learned to not invest too much on the project, staying with the minimum server cost, and that's the only sustainable way for me. In fact it costs me almost nothing and users have built trust on me for running it for 6 years.
I'd give her tons of credit for trying to turn it into a real business. That's what I've been failing so far, or maybe I just don't even have the guts to do. I admire her courage and thus feel really sorry.
Hopefully I'll find another course, who knows.
As a personal note, it's sad to see Grove go away. It was the first bigger service I got to design and I loved working with Leah.
edit: dunno how I overlooked this before: https://www.flowdock.com/help/irc
thanks for making me look again, though!
[1] http://gigaom.com/2012/01/10/convore-grove-io/
[2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3449917
[3] http://betakit.com/2012/02/20/convore-shutting-down-april-1
[4] http://blog.convore.com/post/17951919109/convore-shutting-do...
- Finding a server
- Registering it properly
- Explaining it to non-tech people
It's a shame they're shutting down. I stopped using because it was too expensive for a channel with a few friends (a channel with fewer than 10 friends was costing $25/month).
Campfire succeeds at this because it wasn't their first product. They essentially brought customers in from their other products and then tied them all together. As a stand alone service, it's fairly useless IMO.
Wouldn't it be easier to just register a quakenet channel or even run your own passworded ircd on a spare linux box?
Chat messaging is for quick questions or requests to Skype or Hangout, Skype for 1 to 1 video or extended audio chats, Hangouts for small group video chats (quality is kind of crummy though), teleconference is for larger meetings and the team mailing list is for "hey everybody, check this cool thing out" type stuff.
IRC would be too much for our designers and some project managers.
They put the service out there, and didn't really listen to much feedback or improve it. I was rather disappointed and find this ending... expected.
It makes me nervours...
It would be cool if there were a way to put systems in escrow in case a company tanks or pivots, to protect users. The time to fund and set that up is during development/normal use, not once you've run out of money and decide to shut down, though.
I was a huge fan of Pownce, Motion, LeafyChat, Baconfile, Convore, and Grove. All failed.
I was really hoping this one would work, but after seeing no improvements in a year, it became obvious it wouldn't. :(
..or is Campfire/HipChat/whatever-else-is-left "good enough" to make it not worthwhile?
Those that don't give a fuck are using Campfire/HipChat.
Those that do give a fuck are usually hosting their own IRC.
Find a way to squeeze out both and you have a potentially nice business model. (Hosted IRC + nice web clients for paying customers?)
But huge props to Leah for keeping at it... I'm disappointed at the haters on this thread taking personal pot-shots, instead of recognizing that her record shows an admirable perseverance and a true passion for building better messaging technology.
I guess we'll be looking at hipchat and some of the other alternatives posted here.
If she keeps at it, she will do a successful product, too.
If your home network gets DDoS'd, it's going to be quite an inconvenience.
For example, if Grove.io content can be made to work with Flowdock, contact the Flowdock team and work with them to put a big "Migrate to Flowdock" button on the shutdown announcement page.
That's the part that gets me. I've seen this many times in other startup shutdown posts.
They say it so casually. Like this is just another extracurricular activity they do after school. If they're tired of basketball, they're going to stop and try hockey.
Except that's not how your customers view it. They're paying you money for a service they're using to presumably save/make money.
Honestly, the group business chat niche is just riddled with "incomplete" products in my opinion. Some are great in the browser but have no native web apps (Flowdock), some have shitty mobile apps with mediocre web versions (campfire and hipchat).
I hope someone with a good set of developers, cash in their pockets, and an eye on simplicity would come in and build a full suite of desktop and mobile apps on the back of a good chat system one day. It's absolutely not a solved problem at this point.
Personally, I wouldn't enter this market, regardless of how good my devs or how much money I had. There are at least 3 polished and loved products. The problems you describe will probably be fixed before another team could come in with a good solution.
Hipchat is an amazing product which is steadily getting better under the steam of great developers. It is also owned by Atlassian, a company with great execution and a strong track record of successful cross-selling.
So under these circumstances, no, I personally wouldn't enter this space.
Campfire gets a fair bit of attention here, but is unheard of outside the 'startup'/B2B space. The stats they post are laughable - last time I checked it was a few thousand messages a day - which is pretty minuscule.
Hipchat fills a hole as well, but there are literally thousands of different ways to spin 'webchat' and carve a big following out.
That is laughable - as in it can't possibly be right. Can you provide a link to this?
From campfirenow.com: "Over 100,000 people have used Campfire to send more than 60,000,000 chat messages"
60,000,000 messages, over 67 months, works out at 895,000 a month - approx 28,000 messages a day.
Or one message every 3 seconds. Campfire could be run from a single small VPS.
I think it's entirely believable that the usage of campfire is that low. All credit to them, they've managed to get people to pay for something people don't actually use very often.
Let's assume they doubled in size every year - I think that's a good if imperfect approximation. That would mean 30m messages sent this year, 80K sent today. A far cry for "a few thousand".
Convore even seemed like a darling at Hacker News at the time.
I really liked using this service.
Google Talk is using XMPP, an XML based presence and chat protocol that has also been there for quite a while. It is widely used throughout the net apart from Google Talk.
So both protocols serve their purpose well. IRC is a little more focussed on group chats. While one to one conversations are simple, a presence service is not what IRC was made for. XMPP is strong on presence and one to one chats, with less focus on group chats.
Even in this moment, they still don't seem to be bothering to open source any of it.
There's a lesson to be learnt here in terms of gaining buyer trust when you're small.
I continue to use our own setup for IRC.
How do we overcome this?
(Edit: I was asking a rhetorical question to counter the parent. But great discussion below.)
As time passes and your service stays solid more people will come on board. Something like github is a good example. I doubt many big companies would have considered relying on them early on, but their track record has changed that now.
But since we're on the topic, presenting social proof is also pretty useful. Show customers that people know, show the press that featured you, show them who you are, who your advisors/investors are, show them whose tweeted about you.
(Maybe writing this will be a catalyst to take my own advice for CircleCi)
edit (since I can't reply): logic being that social proof is good for business, but has no substance. It doesn't make it any better for users when it comes to shutting down.
I don't believe I've ever seen you do anything else on HN. I know you to be a reliable person, no reason to think you'd suddenly get fickle and take something I said seriously.
Do you mean to tell me that if somebody rolled up with a check written out for your price you wouldn't light the servers on fire and run for the hills? Realistically the only people who are cared after in any acquisition are the investors so that no bad-blood is in the water for the next acqui-hire. Customers are always left in the dark.
If you want any credibility to the contrary, you'd better start presenting your customers with an SLA that guarantees a detailed transition with a timeline in the case of company failure/acquisition.
Or you can just play PR games. Whatever bare minimum your sense of honesty necessitates.
I'd rather just sit on a happy customer base, but I never thought I'd become a millionaire anyway.
I just want to help people.
> I'd rather just sit on a happy customer base
So everyone else is just in it for the money, but not you? If you can believe it about yourself, perhaps you'd be willing to extend some of that credulity to others?
The list is long. Another recent example was Sparrow. I broke my rule about buying/licensing software from small companies (unless I got the source) with Sparrow. I didn't just buy 1 copy, I (we) brought 15 (for the office). And of course, I got burned. Again.
It will not happen again. Period. Unless you tell me up front your plans - what you plan to do for me, the user, when/if you fail or sell.
Start-ups with more than one product line, sometimes sell off one product and keep the rest acting thesame way big companies do. So, Yext a start-up sold their Felix product line to IAC eg:
http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/20/iac-buys-yexts-pay-per-call...
An example of a giant doing thesame thing:
http://techland.time.com/2012/04/26/google-sells-sketchup-wa...
I have shown above, an example of start-ups and giants selling a product line. You can Google around for example of tech giants and start-ups with more than one product, killing off a product line.
That said, I'm still using Sparrow on my laptop and desktop machines as well as my iPhone. But probably not for a whole lot longer.
Not that your point is invalid talking about Grove - suddenly everyone who used it has to move in under a month. But I don't get the upset over Sparrow. If it helped you at the time, it should help you now.
Leaving with with a ridiculous "feel-good" blog post.
My point though, this isn't uncommon. And this kind of user treatment is one of the big reasons many tech start-ups have a tough time making the sale.
Now of course, if said company manages to get momentum (like a Dropbox, Github, FB - to name a few) - I guess they are no longer startups.
See Atlassian for an example.
As far as I can see, Grove.io didn't do this. They didn't have any easy means to grow quickly.
Also perhaps they're paying a lot for hosting (At rackspace). I don't know, but there's no reason they shouldn't be making some profit if they have a few paying customers. Shame they can't build on that.
Why can't traditional IRC services be used for this? I'll preemptively counter the end-user configuration side of this by saying it's increasingly easier in a managed workstation environment to deploy images with software required for that worker's tasks preconfigured. Even in a non-managed environment, an IT staff willing to build the packages and make the configuration edits can make accessible an installation candidate stored for access in an infrastructure library so users can save (after proper credentialing and auth checks have been satisfied), install and login.
Security, perhaps? That's always a valid concern to have, but if that's the case I would hope that an adequately planned and designed audit of any service not being managed internally gets the same look. Corollary: perhaps one should not be using anything not managed internally for sensitive matters to begin with; collaboration and non-secure communication where a failure of this system wont halt production or cause the company to incur significant loss however are par.
If I'm off base here, I'm willing to discuss it further. While I loved IT, I had to run for the door after getting burned on multiple opportunities to manage programs and create user friendly but secure policies. And by burned I mean hired to do exactly that, only to end up in hyper-glorified purchasing support roles. shudders
If you're a small startup, putting forward a statement that all the code will be open sourced if you shut down should increase the level of comfort your customers have in the product.
What are the downsides I'm not thinking of? Companies that reuse code across multiple products, perhaps. Product A dies, but uses component Foo in Product B that still exists, and represents some kind of special-value-add.
I actually think the solution is to ignore customers with this view. We'll get their business when we "cross the chasm".
It also limits what you can do with your program. If your program uses code you don't have a license to release, you can't open-source it.
It probably needs to be a contract, as the liquidators might ignore it if it is just a statement, depending what happens to the company.
So it would kinda defeat the point of shutting grove down maybe...
That's their psychological bugaboo, not mine.
I'm viscerally aware of inverterate corporate capacity for volatility.
Hahahahaha no. They don't. If only they did anything remotely as nice as that.
The API I was using, was shutdown without any communication. (Adsense for ajax - announced at Google I/O 2010). They simply closed my account without paying the money I was owed (substancial sum). I later found out from a Gooler "yeah they decided to shutdown the product".
Beware of relying on anyone, even a big company who says they won't be evil.
One would want to use an external service, because... well... it's a service. You are paying for someone else to maintain the system and care about the uptime, scalability, security, etc. You surely do not imply that you would pay grove.io simply because you can't bring your own IRC server up, do you?
This is exactly the same as Sparrow, TextMate, etc. None of these companies owe you anything to where they should be required, or even expected, to open source their work.
I am making founders aware of this attitude so that they can
1. Realize that there's a problem
2. Distinguish themselves among their competitors by addressing this concern
I'm not aiming to prescribe solutions, just describing the heuristics I presently rely on to determine if a service is likely to become a liability. I always do a fluid cost-benefit analysis beyond the black-and-white I described in my top comment.
That you believed what I said had anything to do with "demanding" free labor of anyone is telling and indicates a defensive posture on the subject.
Not a surprising reaction to have, given that Sentry (your errors-as-a-service project) depends on people trusting you not to just shut it down tomorrow.
Then there's no issue in the hypothetical scenario I laid out.
I'm a Sentry user (of the hosted service) because it's open sourced. I wouldn't have given you a seconds notice otherwise and I doubt I'm alone in that.
Why be so defensive when you're clearly not in a position to be guilty of leaving all your customers up the creek?