Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

With great sadness we announce the closing of Fluent.io

fluentmail.tumblr.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 48 posts

Re: With great sadness we announce the closing of Fluent.io

#31

Post by nobrogrammer »

cynicalmood wrote: post #3

Its stuff like this that makes me very cynical about a big portion of the startup world. I admire companies that stick to their vision for the long haul and don't bow out because all of a sudden they don't have enough attention/passion/whatever. You'd think that if a party comes out stating huge ambitions and a big vision for fixing a problem, they'd have the determination to match the cause.

@cynicalmood I'm curious whether you've run a startup? How long would you go without an income (if that's the "whatever" you're referring to) even if you believed in the vision?

Re: With great sadness we announce the closing of Fluent.io

#33

Post by boyter »

jaequery wrote: post #11

i'd like a premium email service where i pay for it. these days, i like spending money for products. i'd have paid for fluent.io.

zeromail.com asks you to pay. It used to have a $100 lifetime deal but has moved to monthly payments.

FYI I am not affiliated with them in any way. Just thought I would pipe up with a premium mail service I am aware of that's actually quite good.

Re: With great sadness we announce the closing of Fluent.io

#34

Post by jarin »

andrewfelix wrote: post #10
nilsbunger wrote: post #7

Ay chance of open sourcing it? Maybe the community can carry the torch forward?

You'll be needing centralised scalable servers to make it work :(

If it's open-sourced, shouldn't everyone be able to (eventually) just toss it up on their own personal Linode VPS and use it for themselves?

Re: With great sadness we announce the closing of Fluent.io

#35

Post by kausikram »

Haven't heard much about fluent until now. It does seem to be a problem worth solving and 70,000 signups, does imply that it is a validated problem. Still coming out of the startups world, it feels eerie that a startup would shutdown within 6 months. Is this one more of those many cases, where the cofounders developed a solution for a valid problem, however failed to figure out how to monetize it?

Re: With great sadness we announce the closing of Fluent.io

#36

Post by waseemsadiq »

(I used to run my own cloud based e-mail aggregator www.inbox2.com)

The primary problem with these services is that they have to pull content and have to do it regularly. That means going and checking your inbox every 2-5 minutes to be able to provide a descent experience. Your ISP e-mail provider (or gmail etc) sit there and wait for e-mail to be sent to them making it less processing intensive (push based systems).

There are some techniques such as imap IDLE to make this a bit more efficient but 1. not every e-mail provider supports that and 2. for ex. with gmail idle caps at about 35K connections per box.

You could also have for ex. gmail forward all email to a custom address but average users generally found this very confusing and couldn't get this going.

We calculated that it cost us about 2 euros per month to support a free user providing a 'good' user experience. Good luck making that back as paid service is also not a (scalable) option; the general consensus being: "email is supposed to be free" or "I am already paying for my gmail!".

Re: With great sadness we announce the closing of Fluent.io

#37

Post by bromley »

jaequery wrote: post #11

i'd like a premium email service where i pay for it. these days, i like spending money for products. i'd have paid for fluent.io.

I've been very happily paying for a fastmail.fm business account for the last few years. A rock-solid system, and great at handling lots of addresses on multiple domains.

No affiliation, just a very happy customer.

Re: With great sadness we announce the closing of Fluent.io

#38

Post by pjmlp »

mmahemoff wrote: post #29
mceachen wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox was not an open-source version of Navigator. It was a complete rewrite: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Mozilla_Application_...

AOL released Mozilla as an independent project, which morphed into the stripped down version, Phoenix. Anyway, it was already open source by the time it was released, so it's a very different situation to this startup-releasing-open-source wish, but still the closest example I can think of, when considering only successful projects.

Phoenix only became Firefox thanks to Google's support, otherwise it would have eventually died.

Re: With great sadness we announce the closing of Fluent.io

#39

Post by kaolinite »

andrewfelix wrote: post #9
xqyz wrote: post #8

> Email is quite clearly a thing that needs fixing Honestly, I've never seen it that way. Email continues to work fine. It's platform independent and easy to use/setup. It's probably one of the best things on the internet ever.

Email is great. But long threads with various forwards and cc's become incredibly painful. Gmail have gone some way to fixing it, but Fluent.io looked like they were doing a great job (Judging by the demo videos)

But isn't that what tools like Basecamp and such are for? Email is great, IMO people just use it for the wrong things.

Re: With great sadness we announce the closing of Fluent.io

#40

Post by Joeri »

mmahemoff wrote: post #29
mceachen wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox was not an open-source version of Navigator. It was a complete rewrite: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Mozilla_Application_...

AOL released Mozilla as an independent project, which morphed into the stripped down version, Phoenix. Anyway, it was already open source by the time it was released, so it's a very different situation to this startup-releasing-open-source wish, but still the closest example I can think of, when considering only successful projects.

Netscape committed to spinning off mozilla prior to the AOL deal. Also, mozilla is an example of how releasing a closed source codebase often doesn't work, because the mozilla project ended up throwing away the old code and rewriting the engine and user interface.

A better example is blender, whose source was bought out and open sourced through a community effort.

Post reply on HN