An acquisition was pretty much an expected outcome since there was no way a company with $10.5 million in VC funding over 10 years could go public. IMO the comm

An acquisition was pretty much an expected outcome since there was no way a company with $10.5 million in VC funding over 10 years could go public. IMO the comments as a service space is a terrible fit for the VC model. It's easy to get to scale by offering a free service, but very very hard to monetize. You can force ads on your users, but you end up being at the receiving end of users' wrath, as was the case with Disqus. I've tried talking to VCs with the idea for a Disqus alternative [0] and many of them shared the same concern : market size. It's tiny. A back of the envelope calculation gives me a number between $100 million and $200 million in ARR potential with most of the revenue being generated via ads instead of paid subscriptions. Disqus serves 17 billion monthly pageviews which translates to roughly $1.7 million in MRR. So yeah, I guess this space is more suited for the artisanal variety (bootstrapped companies) than the VC model. Another guy who's been working on an alternative for 3 years is `foxhop with Remarkbox [1]. [0] https://www.hostedcomments.com/ https://www.hostedcomments.com/ [1] https://www.remarkbox.com/ https://www.remarkbox.com/