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Grove.io shutting down

grove.io

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Re: Grove.io shutting down

#101

Post by mibbitier »

pbiggar wrote: post #82
robbiet480 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because there are at least three other services out there means you can't also enter the space and try to disrupt it still?

Campfire is made by a company with a massive and rabid following, and is cross-sold to the users of three other popular products, two books, and a massive blog. 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 person…

You're stuck in a bubble.

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.

Re: Grove.io shutting down

#102

Post by huhtenberg »

heretohelp wrote: post #5

This is why I refuse to use external services hosted by small/tiny companies that haven't open-sourced their tech. 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's being an open source a requirement?

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?

Re: Grove.io shutting down

#103

Post by plusbryan »

Rayne wrote: post #7

It's getting a little difficult to trust stuff by Leah Culver. Everything (that I know of) that she has done so far has either shut down or been acquired and shut down. That said, no hard feelings. It's hard out there. I've never tried to run a company, so I can't judge.

Companies are shut down for a variety of reasons, and entrepreneurial success is often equal parts idea, luck, and hard work. Leah has built several popular products with loyal followings - which is more than a lot of us can say.

Re: Grove.io shutting down

#104

Post by tijs »

kenn wrote: post #24

As a founder of http://lingr.com , I know firsthand how hard to build a chat app and make it sustainable. I've been working on it since 2006, first as a startup, then as my personal side project. 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 y…

Looks pretty good actually (from the screenshot), you even have an iPhone app and everything. Why not just charge a small something, even if it's only to get you a nice side income? Somebody mentioned $5/month as a reasonable price for something like this. For me personally that would make me less hesitant to sign up as currently it would seem you could pull the plug any moment. Unless you like the idea of being able to pull the plug at any moment of course, which of course is your prerogative.

Re: Grove.io shutting down

#105

Post by heretohelp »

jkaljundi wrote: post #92
heretohelp wrote: post #5

This is why I refuse to use external services hosted by small/tiny companies that haven't open-sourced their tech. 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.

There is no difference between large and small tech companies shutting down their services. Google has shut down close to 50 services in recent year if I remember correctly: http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/03/google-shutdowns-continue-i...

I am in the middle of moving an API over from a Google one that got shutdown recently. This has cost me a substantial chunk of time, more than it likely has cost you.

I'm viscerally aware of inverterate corporate capacity for volatility.

Re: Grove.io shutting down

#106

Post by heretohelp »

polemic wrote: post #95

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, wh…

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.

Re: Grove.io shutting down

#107

Post by heretohelp »

huhtenberg wrote: post #102
heretohelp wrote: post #5

This is why I refuse to use external services hosted by small/tiny companies that haven't open-sourced their tech. 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's being an open source a requirement? 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?

I already have IRC for our company.

Re: Grove.io shutting down

#108

Post by robryan »

crag wrote: post #34
robryan wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It takes time. Some kind of competitive advantage over everything else in the marketplace will help to. People need a reason to bet on your company which overcomes the risk in instability. 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…

Yeah but, Github is a different sort of product. You don't lose much if it shuts down (assuming you have your code). You can push your code someplace else.

I disagree, maybe that might have been a point that allowed more people to give it a try in the early days. A lot of companies have integrated APIs and built workflows around the github specific way of doing things.

Re: Grove.io shutting down

#109

Post by mh- »

sown wrote: post #45
Rayne wrote: post #7

It's getting a little difficult to trust stuff by Leah Culver. Everything (that I know of) that she has done so far has either shut down or been acquired and shut down. That said, no hard feelings. It's hard out there. I've never tried to run a company, so I can't judge.

I wish I could create things that people might actually want but I can't think of anything that I could make that people would want.

you could start with a replacement for grove.io.

heh. can someone recommend an alternative that also supports connecting via standard IRC protocol?

Re: Grove.io shutting down

#110

Post by zeeg »

heretohelp wrote: post #5

This is why I refuse to use external services hosted by small/tiny companies that haven't open-sourced their tech. 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.

Why should anyone create software just so you can have it for free? You're not entitled to open source software, or the goodwill of others. If they decided that they didn't want to continue running their product, they can choose to shut it down.

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.

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