9 ms·

Fieldbook is shutting down

74 points by mjirv 8y ago

modeless 8y ago
Too bad. I thought this product looked really great, but I didn't have a reason to use it.
sho 8y ago
Very good post-mortem but left me with questions: 1. Raised $2.9m, 4 employees, 5 years. Let's say 2/3 of overhead was salary, which seems reasonable. So that's 500k each, or 100k/yr. This seems excessive? Were the founders paying themselves too much? Or where did the money go? 2. Difficulty in hiring. This seems very much attributable with the company's proximity to the SF black hole. Was relocation never even considered? And why was remote not considered? I would have liked to hear the reasons for those decisions. All the points about potential recruits demanding "sexy" jobs or wanting to see high growth and large rounds seem pretty much exclusively SF problems. It seems like moving literally anywhere else would have solved this. 3. What is the actual reason for closing down? Out of money, or out of confidence? If my salary numbers above are wrong - and I should hope they are - maybe they still have a mil or so left, which seems like enough runway to take a stab at least some of the problems. There were two seemingly contradictory considerations: lack of ability to iterate fast enough, and a realisation that the product was not viable. I would have liked to hear more about this too - iterating faster on the wrong thing would not have helped. 4. I know it's too late but even as an IT type when I look at the landing page I have very little idea what the product even does. A lot of features and use cases listed but what is the product and how does it solve any problem? There's a single screenshot four page heights down which looks like some kind of spreadsheet. It's not nearly enough. Still, an honest, insightful and heartfelt piece and I wish the team good luck.
- TAForObvReasons 8y ago
  I wouldn't be surprised if the recent massive funding round for AirTable ($52M) forced some introspection and possibly created some external pressure.
- cdsboy 8y ago
  The actual reason for closing down was laid out in the article. They got a talent acquisition offer and took it.
  - cpeterso 8y ago
    Flexport is an interesting place for Fieldbook to land, but I do see some synergies. I wonder if the team will focus on improving Flexport's internal operations or building a platform for Flexport's customers.
  - jypepin 8y ago
    I think the parent's question is related to why did they should the acquisition vs continuing.
- modeless 8y ago
  100k/yr excessive? When Facebook's median compensation is 240k? The economics of working for a startup seem worse than ever these days.
- brotherjerky 8y ago
  > 1. Raised $2.9m, 4 employees, 5 years. Let's say 2/3 of overhead was salary, which seems reasonable. So that's 500k each, or 100k/yr. This seems excessive? Were the founders paying themselves too much? Or where did the money go? This comment is so naive that I don't know where to begin. You can't hire any quality people at $100k / yr fully loaded in SF Bay area.
  - venantius 8y ago
    For a seed stage company, 100k is not at all unreasonable. Extremely early employees get hefty stock grants to compensate for this.
    - user5994461 8y ago
      That's looking for a co-founder or unpaid labor, not an employee.
    - RikNieu 8y ago
      Out of interest - what is considered a hefty stock grant?
phrz 8y ago
So, are they open sourcing this then? Or just burning this all down to make a point? Something notably unanswered.
- RoiDuSilence 8y ago
  I am curious as well.
oron 8y ago
The product could be improved, look at Monday.com for an example of what this product could have been. The difference is in the details ... small UI / UX details but very important.
kalleboo 8y ago
I miss the days when this would be a humble Shareware product
- sleepychu 8y ago
  Give away all the value you create at home while you toil away creating value for someone else at work? Why do you miss that?
  - icebraining 8y ago
    I think you're confusing shareware with freeware.
kvdmolen 8y ago
I'm founder of https://www.fundo.co/ https://www.fundo.co/ and some things sound terribly familiar. However, I think it starts with deciding who you make your product for in this case, as application of this kind of product is tremendous (imagine making a list of things you can do with Excel). As mentioned here, I don't see this razor-sharp focus in Fieldbook, which could be the reason of missing traction? Fundo is about to undergo a major transformation, exactly for the reason of simplicity..
pbowyer 8y ago
> But at a time when every engineer wanted to work on AI, self-driving cars or cryptocurrencies, a SaaS startup with modest, sporadic growth wasn’t very attractive. Were they looking to hire in the SF/SV area only? I enjoy these kinds of projects (though wasn't & am not looking for a FT role), and I know a few others who do — but because we’re not driven by the hype train, we don’t live in the normal ‘tech’ areas. Further down the article I see they were on the 'peninsula' (not sure where that is) and didn't want to become a remote team. But if they weren't in SF, there must be programmers around who enjoy data work, not buzzword-tech?
asavinov 8y ago
Sad to see it go. I had professional interest to Fieldbook because I had been developing a similar "spreadsheet"-like application intended for radically changing the way table table is processed - http://conceptoriented.com http://conceptoriented.com - and failed. Finally, I decided to move this (quite unique) technology to completely different area and re-implement it as a kind of major alternative to MapReduce focused on general-purpose batch and stream processing (mainly IoT and edge analytics): https://github.com/asavinov/bistro https://github.com/asavinov/bistro I am curious to see what happens with other apps like airtable, rowshare or zenkit and the whole market. Will they be able to survive as independent companies (like Tableau or Qlik in self-service BI)?
liberal_098 8y ago
> The flagship feature was a way to link sheets of data to create a relational structure. It is also the most difficult feature to implement from the theoretical point of view and non-obvious feature for the users to understand. Therefore, we still have the relational world and the spreadsheet world existing separately almost in isolation.
user5994461 8y ago
> we recruited a head of growth quickly, but couldn’t close a designer or another engineer. A company with two employees recruiting a head of growth while there is noone to do any of the work that needs to be done.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
swyx 8y ago
appreciate the openness. honestly being acquihired by flexport isn't the worst outcome. i think Jason's next venture, should he have one, will benefit a lot from his learnings from Fieldbook. any users of airtable (i'm not one) can comment on what he thinks Airtable got right? >In contrast, our closest competitor, Airtable, seems to be getting more traction. Early on, their product focus was subtly different, with more emphasis on mobile experience and collaboration features than on data modeling or formulas. These aren’t the features that were most important to the users we talked to, but they’re easier to understand, and I suspect they made both marketing and onboarding easier for Airtable—maybe just enough to make all the difference. --- Edit: here's their most successful Show HN from 3years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10752570 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10752570 and a month before that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10508038 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10508038
g105b 8y ago
Damn it, I read that as "Facebook is shutting down".

74 points by mjirv 8y ago

Too bad. I thought this product looked really great, but I didn't have a reason to use it.

sho 8y ago

Very good post-mortem but left me with questions: 1. Raised $2.9m, 4 employees, 5 years. Let's say 2/3 of overhead was salary, which seems reasonable. So that's 500k each, or 100k/yr. This seems excessive? Were the founders paying themselves too much? Or where did the money go? 2. Difficulty in hiring. This seems very much attributable with the company's proximity to the SF black hole. Was relocation never even considered? And why was remote not considered? I would have liked to hear the reasons for those decisions. All the points about potential recruits demanding "sexy" jobs or wanting to see high growth and large rounds seem pretty much exclusively SF problems. It seems like moving literally anywhere else would have solved this. 3. What is the actual reason for closing down? Out of money, or out of confidence? If my salary numbers above are wrong - and I should hope they are - maybe they still have a mil or so left, which seems like enough runway to take a stab at least some of the problems. There were two seemingly contradictory considerations: lack of ability to iterate fast enough, and a realisation that the product was not viable. I would have liked to hear more about this too - iterating faster on the wrong thing would not have helped. 4. I know it's too late but even as an IT type when I look at the landing page I have very little idea what the product even does. A lot of features and use cases listed but what is the product and how does it solve any problem? There's a single screenshot four page heights down which looks like some kind of spreadsheet. It's not nearly enough. Still, an honest, insightful and heartfelt piece and I wish the team good luck.

TAForObvReasons 8y ago
I wouldn't be surprised if the recent massive funding round for AirTable ($52M) forced some introspection and possibly created some external pressure.
cdsboy 8y ago
The actual reason for closing down was laid out in the article. They got a talent acquisition offer and took it.
- cpeterso 8y ago
  Flexport is an interesting place for Fieldbook to land, but I do see some synergies. I wonder if the team will focus on improving Flexport's internal operations or building a platform for Flexport's customers.
- jypepin 8y ago
  I think the parent's question is related to why did they should the acquisition vs continuing.
modeless 8y ago
100k/yr excessive? When Facebook's median compensation is 240k? The economics of working for a startup seem worse than ever these days.
brotherjerky 8y ago
> 1. Raised $2.9m, 4 employees, 5 years. Let's say 2/3 of overhead was salary, which seems reasonable. So that's 500k each, or 100k/yr. This seems excessive? Were the founders paying themselves too much? Or where did the money go? This comment is so naive that I don't know where to begin. You can't hire any quality people at $100k / yr fully loaded in SF Bay area.
- venantius 8y ago
  For a seed stage company, 100k is not at all unreasonable. Extremely early employees get hefty stock grants to compensate for this.
  - user5994461 8y ago
    That's looking for a co-founder or unpaid labor, not an employee.
  - RikNieu 8y ago
    Out of interest - what is considered a hefty stock grant?

phrz 8y ago

So, are they open sourcing this then? Or just burning this all down to make a point? Something notably unanswered.

RoiDuSilence 8y ago
I am curious as well.

oron 8y ago

The product could be improved, look at Monday.com for an example of what this product could have been. The difference is in the details ... small UI / UX details but very important.

kalleboo 8y ago

I miss the days when this would be a humble Shareware product

sleepychu 8y ago
Give away all the value you create at home while you toil away creating value for someone else at work? Why do you miss that?
- icebraining 8y ago
  I think you're confusing shareware with freeware.

kvdmolen 8y ago

I'm founder of https://www.fundo.co/ https://www.fundo.co/ and some things sound terribly familiar. However, I think it starts with deciding who you make your product for in this case, as application of this kind of product is tremendous (imagine making a list of things you can do with Excel). As mentioned here, I don't see this razor-sharp focus in Fieldbook, which could be the reason of missing traction? Fundo is about to undergo a major transformation, exactly for the reason of simplicity..

pbowyer 8y ago

> But at a time when every engineer wanted to work on AI, self-driving cars or cryptocurrencies, a SaaS startup with modest, sporadic growth wasn’t very attractive. Were they looking to hire in the SF/SV area only? I enjoy these kinds of projects (though wasn't & am not looking for a FT role), and I know a few others who do — but because we’re not driven by the hype train, we don’t live in the normal ‘tech’ areas. Further down the article I see they were on the 'peninsula' (not sure where that is) and didn't want to become a remote team. But if they weren't in SF, there must be programmers around who enjoy data work, not buzzword-tech?

asavinov 8y ago

Sad to see it go. I had professional interest to Fieldbook because I had been developing a similar "spreadsheet"-like application intended for radically changing the way table table is processed - http://conceptoriented.com http://conceptoriented.com - and failed. Finally, I decided to move this (quite unique) technology to completely different area and re-implement it as a kind of major alternative to MapReduce focused on general-purpose batch and stream processing (mainly IoT and edge analytics): https://github.com/asavinov/bistro https://github.com/asavinov/bistro I am curious to see what happens with other apps like airtable, rowshare or zenkit and the whole market. Will they be able to survive as independent companies (like Tableau or Qlik in self-service BI)?

liberal_098 8y ago

> The flagship feature was a way to link sheets of data to create a relational structure. It is also the most difficult feature to implement from the theoretical point of view and non-obvious feature for the users to understand. Therefore, we still have the relational world and the spreadsheet world existing separately almost in isolation.

user5994461 8y ago

> we recruited a head of growth quickly, but couldn’t close a designer or another engineer. A company with two employees recruiting a head of growth while there is noone to do any of the work that needs to be done.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

swyx 8y ago

appreciate the openness. honestly being acquihired by flexport isn't the worst outcome. i think Jason's next venture, should he have one, will benefit a lot from his learnings from Fieldbook. any users of airtable (i'm not one) can comment on what he thinks Airtable got right? >In contrast, our closest competitor, Airtable, seems to be getting more traction. Early on, their product focus was subtly different, with more emphasis on mobile experience and collaboration features than on data modeling or formulas. These aren’t the features that were most important to the users we talked to, but they’re easier to understand, and I suspect they made both marketing and onboarding easier for Airtable—maybe just enough to make all the difference. --- Edit: here's their most successful Show HN from 3years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10752570 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10752570 and a month before that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10508038 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10508038

g105b 8y ago

Damn it, I read that as "Facebook is shutting down".