Charm shutting down because of unfixable kernel panics with Rails on Ubuntu

We had Rails Core team members spend lots of time trying to fix our Rails 3.x slowdowns. As you probably know, Thomas is a Rails Core Alumnus and we have lots of personal connections in the Rails community.

Nobody could identify it.

Our sysadmin was a sysadmin for one of the first, biggest, and most reliable Rails app ecosystems. He couldn't trace the Ubuntu issue.

It sounds like you don't have a lot of experience running a business. When you do, you will realize that just throwing money at problems doesn't solve anything.

PS - We have servers at Rackspace. 3 of them. Where do you think a lot of that money went? They're $3k a month. And guess what — they won't manage servers with the configuration we required. Fab.

Yes, the other gentlemen are correct. This was all our own money. Which we earned from scratch from our other products (all doing very well, thank you). And, perhaps more galling, VCs approach us every month to try to invest (but we're against it).

I'm sure shutting down a perfectly good and potentially very profitable product will make lots of wannabes and aspiring entrepreneurs jealous. Luckily I don't make my life decisions based on what other people would do in my situation.

When you run a real business, with real customers, you quickly discover that what sounds good, isn't, and what looks bad, is often the absolutely right thing to do. Luckily, our early access customers for Charm heard & understood & appreciated my email.

If you ask me, it's bad to advertise that you publicly speculate, with resounding authority, on things you know absolutely nothing about.

Haha, won't get funded ever? I have VCs knocking on my inbox doors on a monthly basis. We don't take funding. We have, however, brought in >$1 million in revenue on products since we started doing products, including http://letsfreckle.com.

The sysadmin I mentioned is one of the most respected experts in the community. He wasn't cheap. He had a fantastic legacy of very good, very public work. And yet, here we are.

When you run a real business, you will be faced with tough decisions. Hopefully you will be able to make wise choices as well.

What I find interesting about the reaction to this email, from you bench spectators, is that you completely missed the point of the email.

The email isn't "Wah we hit a server problem, bye bye."

The point is:

"What this has really shown us is that, if we open Charm to the general public, we won't be able to provide you with the kind of service you deserve. We are a tiny team, and so far, we've had zero luck in our attempts to grow by hiring developers. Problems which are small now will only get bigger."

If you've never run a serious product, or a real business, or tried to hire for technical positions, I can understand why you'd zero in on the "facts" about the technical situation and ignore all the "foofy personal window dressing," and write things like "I call BS! It's a smoke screen!" or "Why didn't they just try BSD?"

And yet I addressed the actual problem in very clear terms in a paragraph you can't possibly miss.

Next time somebody makes a hard business decision and you hear about it on HN and come out, irony guns blazing, may I humbly suggest you read more than the subject line written by the unrelated HN submitter?

As for any poor silent, lurkers who wonder if this is how they will be treated if they -- gasp! -- ever find themselves in over their heads, or in a business they realize they don't actually want to be in… our customer reactions have been uniformly:

"Aw, I'm so sorry... Charm is such a nice piece of software... your email was so touching."

Why? Because we've always shown our customers respect by creating great software, and we're showing them even more respect by ensuring we do not make promises we can't keep.

Our friends and technical acquaintances have been full of nothing but sympathy, understanding, and for those closest to the situation, praise for making the right, hard decision.

Yep, it sucked. Yep, we poured something like $200k into development, redevelopment, and infrastructure all told. Yep, it is a fucking amazing piece of software and the best thing I've ever designed.

But is it worth the constant heartache of the impossible task of finding people equipped to work on it? Of having it stuck in some kind of product half-life because of that? Of feeling responsible for, but incapable of, being "on call" in the middle of the night?

Of feeling guilty because, unless we can somehow suddenly be great at those things, we're taking money for a service which might let our customers down?

Nope. It's not worth it.

And boy do I feel lucky and privileged that because we spent nothing but our own money on it, we are free to decide to do whatever we think is right.

See also my principles 10 and 11: http://unicornfree.com/2011/lessons-learned-from-16-years-of...

Think twice, like what? "Gee, there's a woman with integrity who shuts down a service while it still works 99% of the time, and refunds my money, instead of growing it like a nutjob until it has weekly downtime like oh I don't know Desk.com"?

I do so hope you're right.