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Ugh, I don't understand how Grove.io can just drift apart like that. Surely Grove's costs were relatively low, and my impression was that there was a significant level of uptake.

> "..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.

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I also wish they would address:

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).

Just because something should have paying customers doesn't necessarily mean that it has paying customers. There are other factors involved.

Better put: are you a paying customer? If not, then most likely other potential customers are unaware.

FWIW, I was a paying customer. I know others who were as well. Most everyone I know, including myself as of two weeks ago, has stopped paying for the service. It had gone downhill to the point of being unusable.

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.

I'm not doubting what you say, but I'm interested in how the service went downhill?

Yes (well, employer was/is a paying customer).

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.

Sociable Labs (my employer) is/was a paying customer of grove.io

We started using grove on a large client back in February / March and as of this month we are still paying clients. We started trying out flowdoc recently but we are trying out a few options between now and October. Outages aside, our clients liked the product.

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.

Flowdock's similar IRC gateway is already open source: https://github.com/flowdock/oulu

I reached out to Leah with the same questions, but in lieu of a response I spent a few minutes setting up a replacement that is both an IRC server and a hosted web client: https://github.com/LocalSense/hosted-irc

I'll hack on it a bit more tonight, but it shouldn't be too difficult to replicate what Grove.io does.

Might want to simply contribute to this, unless I'm misunderstanding :) https://github.com/thedjpetersen/subway

We're actually using a forked version of Subway for the UI. Our package also includes an IRC server as well, as it aims to be a complete Grove replacement.

From Leah at grove.io:

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

If you'd simply dump it out into the open, I at least would be happy to pick it up.

That's a weak answer. Just put it out there, let other people maintain it.

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.

Someone should start a "start-up adoption" program. Facilitate others adopting projects when the owners want to move on, but the viability is still contentious

The fact that nobody's happy with a profitable, but modest bootstrapped company is causing them to abandon these smaller companies.

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.

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