Homejoy, Datajoy, killjoy?
Maybe the clue is in the name!
DataJoy is shutting down
31–40 of 47 posts
Re: DataJoy is shutting down
#32I'm curious what the founders / anyone else think went wrong? Especially compared to ShareLaTeX
Re: DataJoy is shutting down
#33I'm curious what the founders / anyone else think went wrong? Especially compared to ShareLaTeX
The short answer is we didn't find product / market fit. It made some people happy, and was useful to some people, but it didn't make people go out and tell everyone they know to start using it. ShareLaTeX on the other hand was growing organically and had people singing it's praises even when it would sometimes randomly lose 30 minutes worth of your latest changes... (yes really! That's very fixed now though don't worry). ShareLaTeX just filled a much deeper need for people. There are so many other Python/R options out there that we never filled a deep need with DataJoy.
The exception to that is in teaching. It did fill a big need there, but we never managed to make the business model work (long high touch sales cycles, but universities only willing to pay very low prices per class). We also never found a growth model for this.
Re: DataJoy is shutting down
#34Why don't companies feel comfortably "code dumping"? Just throw everything online as a tarball, and say "we aren't supporting this and we don't want to have anything to do wit h this, but here's the source."
Can you legally do this? Not sure how the legal terms around assets are normally structured...
If the code is your sole asset, wouldn't investors get access to it? This is kind of like lighting your office chairs on fire vs returning them to investors.
Re: DataJoy is shutting down
#35I never hear about these companies until their shutdown announcement. Perhaps if they spent more time becoming visible and getting people's attention, things would work out.
With thousands and thousands of startups competing for your attention, it's not that easy!
In many markets, there are several well-funded startups that can afford to spend millions on marketing. That makes it even harder to get visibility as a bootstrapper.
Re: DataJoy is shutting down
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
DataJoy Co-founder here. A lot of the DataJoy code IS available ( https://github.com/sharelatex/web-sharelatex/tree/datajoy ). Our other product ShareLaTeX has an open-source version that you can run locally and is very similar to the version we host at sharelatex.com. DataJoy naturally shares a lot of code with ShareLaTeX (if you look at the two products, you'll see they're very similar). However, with DataJoy, we n…
I'm sorry to hear y'all are shutting down, I've been a big fan of Sharelatex for going on two years now and have always used it to build my resumes.
I think they are only closing down Datajoy.
Re: DataJoy is shutting down
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm sorry to hear y'all are shutting down, I've been a big fan of Sharelatex for going on two years now and have always used it to build my resumes.
I think they are only closing down Datajoy.
Indeed, and one of the reasons is the success of ShareLaTeX means that it takes our team's whole attention to keep up with the growth of ShareLaTeX, and keep investing in feature development to keep up with demand. ShareLaTeX isn't going anywhere.
Re: DataJoy is shutting down
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
I know this isn't a general rule, but based on my experiences with proprietary projects, even with the best of intentions most became a jenga-esque pile of hacks and shortcuts that few developers would want to show off in public even if the overall system works well.
> most became a jenga-esque pile of hacks and shortcuts that few developers would want to show off in public Not just that they don't want to "show off", but even more that they don't think it will be useful. It takes a non zero amount of work to document a project such that it can be used and extended by someone who didn't write it.
I'm a proponent of publishing code that's useless, obsolete, buggy, poorly documented, etc, if the rights holders are so inclined. The reason is that I think it can still be useful as training data for, say, designing new programming languages/tools around coding patterns seen in the wild.
Re: DataJoy is shutting down
#39Why don't companies feel comfortably "code dumping"? Just throw everything online as a tarball, and say "we aren't supporting this and we don't want to have anything to do wit h this, but here's the source."
Can you legally do this? Not sure how the legal terms around assets are normally structured... If the code is your sole asset, wouldn't investors get access to it? This is kind of like lighting your office chairs on fire vs returning them to investors.
In this particular case, they have no external investors. They say in their announcement: "...but as a small company without external investment..."
Re: DataJoy is shutting down
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think they are only closing down Datajoy.
Indeed, and one of the reasons is the success of ShareLaTeX means that it takes our team's whole attention to keep up with the growth of ShareLaTeX, and keep investing in feature development to keep up with demand. ShareLaTeX isn't going anywhere.
So that sounds like success (even though it's sad for datajoy users)! You guys tested the waters with 2 products, one has found product-market fit, and now you guys are focusing on growing that one.