Truth is, this service never quite delivered on their promise. When my last two startups closed shop, it took shutdownify over 3 days to process the first one, and the second was still a full two days to get up and running. At that point I could have just put together a page myself.
It didn't help that they rewrote their tech stack from Ruby to Node even as they were trying to find customers. In the end, the user doesn't care what it's built with.
It really is a company that is destined to fail: only during a bubble would such an idea get VC funding, but it's only after the bubble bursts that they'd have a hockey stick growth. It's an enigma wrapped up in a paradox
I think they could have served their shutdown notices off of nginx and then they could have held up under reddit hugs, or at least with cloudflare. Ultimately, a static page cannot be optimally served off of Node.
I know this is meant as a joke, but as a just do some good in world service - it's not a bad idea: kind of like a hospice for startups.
Shutting down your baby is not a fun process. It's exponentially worse if it involves money from people close to you, laying off employees, and / or a very public notice to the whole (startup) world. I'm pretty sure everyone involved would be exhausted in every way. It would nice if there were people who could ease the pain. It's probably not something you conquer the world with, but it would make this place suck just a little less (maybe as a non-profit).
Yeah but actually would have been better if they had registered the domain some time ago,let it bake for some time, and then put up the shutdown page and watch as HN commenters questions but took them somewhat seriously.
While I feel bad for the companies who relied on this service and must now write their own shutdown notices, it's their own fault for trusting a SaaS and not using a self-hosted solution.
Are we sure they're actually shutting down? Maybe this is just a demonstration of their product, and the quality of the shutdown notice is so high that we're unable to distinguish this from the real thing.
As a matter of fact, fake shutdown notices could be a great source of...
=== NOTICE OF COMMENT SHUTDOWN ===
The board has decided that this comment stopped being funny several sentences ago, and has decided to disband the whole thing and go get a sandwich. Cheers!
Yeah, but I find it unconscionable that they even launched their MVP without an iOS and Android app - their service is _clearly_ worthless without push notifications.
"We thought hard about the right label for our company, which would best convey our mission to the people in the industry. Now, I am very happy to say we came to a great final name. The idea of The Beginning and The End, expressed in a symmetrical bigram joined by a familiar and well-established TLD is just what conveys best the sense of our commitment to bring an information service that strives to stay in touch with the most recent failures on the startup scene, help the novice founders make the best informed decisions and thus contribute our little bit into making the world a better place." - CEO
Well-done satire...having the blog run on Tumblr and using a barely modified Bootstrap template, with parallax scrolling over a background image of a Brooklyn coffee house would've made it perfect.
I thought it several seconds. I even thought "wow this idea must be the dumbest...." before I loaded the comments of this thread and immediately realised that it was I who were dumb.
Actually, it tells us all a lot about the world when we think, even for the briefest moment "well, I guess, it isn't the most absurd thing I've heard".
They will be their own customer forever, so they can give themselves $10MM a month for the notice, and hence produces revenues of $120MM, and easily get a $6bn valuation.
They really should have tried to find a way to keep going (longer than a day, at least!). There's going to be a lot of demand for this service in the coming year. Someone should buy their assets and wait for the coming bust^Wboom.
Unfortunately, I regret to inform you that the sum total of their assets is already freely available and downloadable on the web. I don't think they'll be able to sell them for much after that sort of IP disaster. Another business destroyed by CTRL-S piracy. When will the browser vendors take this sort of thing seriously and put DRM on web pages?
For all the satisfied clients, and the investors that just took a writedown on this year's tax return, now's a good reminder that the Internet Archive accepts donations:
I had the opportunity to meet the CEO and founding team. Brilliant guys. But they got too caught up with the how. Ruby then to Node and now to Go. The promises - from companies shutting down to pay up, didn't pan out. I wish there was a consumer version of this - I would love to set up a page to survive me after my demise and I prepay for 10 years of hosting. Demisify ?
The funny thing is this actually could be a good idea. Big companies do source code escrow as part of on premise software purchases. A SaaS equivalent which handled data portability, ongoing legal/compliance, etc, as a 10% surcharge on invoices or something, could solve this for SaaS, making purchases happen when they might not now.
Or, it's real and this is a publicity stunt to get some exposure, or a noncommittal way to see how people react to find out if anyone would actually be interested.
I heard a legend that the Shutdownify stack detects that an entry has been created for Shutdownify itself. When that happens, it is treated like a FIN packet: the software serves up the shutdown notice, but schedules an actual shutdown of itself after a configured period.
I was in the market for such a solution and tried to use them, but the pricing was really high. I'm not sure that paying per view on a shutdown notice is the best model, I would have preferred a flat fee.
How does something like this even get investors? The business model banks on the fact that start-ups are going to fail-- I could imagine scenarios where potential investors also have money invested into the companies that Shutdownify would be servicing.
It was a perfect business that didn't get the timing right. Their business would have thrived during 2000, 2008. Now if they lasted a few more months, they would have been perfectly positioned to take major market share in the Fall 2015 recession.
Sadly, my first thought was someone tried to outsource the gathering of company failures to the actual company so they could write an f'd company article for the ad revenue. Worse, this didn't sound as bad as other business concepts.
Guess they couldn't compete with ExitPlan.com . They do full shutdowns and acquisitions, as well as auctioning off the redundant employees to the highest bidder.
The problem with this business model is clearly that if a company is shutting down it has severe cashflow problems and would not be willing to pay for a SaaS service for such a thing as trivial as a shutdown notice. It really is a badly formed business model and is rampant in this 'oh lets get a good team and we can always pivot if we fuck up' world.
This kind of start up irks mes as a sign that we have really reached the top of the bubble. Really sell your SF real estate now. Its is going to crash. It is such a waste of developer talent to put effort into hapless startups like this. I would like to know which fools invested in this so I can avoid taking their investment too.
</ Look someone has to take it seriously ;-D >
Edit: Damn this backfired. The downvoterz haz spoken!
It didn't help that they rewrote their tech stack from Ruby to Node even as they were trying to find customers. In the end, the user doesn't care what it's built with.