12 ms·

Hey there, I'm the founder. Happy to answer any questions people have. This was a decision I didn't take lightly.

by lukethomas 4y ago

victor_e 4y ago
Hey. Shame you have to shut it down. Great that you gave it a shot though. Do you have any plans for what is next?
hiimshort 4y ago
What do you plan to do with the platform that you have built? Is all of the code being thrown away?
newusertoday 4y ago
1. what is your opinion on making the code open source? 2. Selling the company so someone else can take care of customers?
- trustfundbaby 4y ago
  I had this question as well/
nathancahill 4y ago
I'd love to hear your response to this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30933873 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30933873
Dangeranger 4y ago
You mentioned in your post that your primary reason for shutting down was that you didn't find sufficient evidence that your product/service was meeting the needs of your users. Was there also pressure from investors to shut down due to this lack of evidence, or was this a personal decision made based on your principles? Thank you for your consideration.
- lukethomas 4y ago
  I made the decision after a lot of reflection. We still had ~6 months of runway so I could have spent more time "pivoting" around. The issue was that what I was hearing from prospects, customers, users signaled a bigger issue that could not be solved with a product tweak or two. At the end of the day, I felt like the story I would need to tell a future investor (and new/existing employees) would increasingly become disconnected from the reality I was experiencing talking to customers/users. I didn't feel at peace about it at all. I considered it to be a form of lying.
  - carimura 4y ago
    much respect. those are hard feelings to deal with especially given you had users, customers, investors, and a team to think about as well, none of which you can easily and cleanly ask for advice on this matter.
  - pedalpete 4y ago
    This is a great answer, I felt the same way about my previous start-up Ayvri.com We make enough to cover our costs, so I've kept it going for the last 2 years. As I kept looking for new ways for us to grow, and what pivots might work, one of our existing investors said to me [paraphasing] "we'll invest more if you know what to do with it, but I [the investor] think you should start thinking about what your next thing is. We'll invest in that, but there comes a time you need to move on". That chat was really impactful, they were happy to see us launch a product, get customers, and try to build something really amazing (and we kinda did). The same team that created Ayvri (most of us) have come back together to create https://soundmind.co https://soundmind.co - we haven't taken investment yet, but the same investors are ready to back us when we do. Did you have that kind of support from your investors @Lukethomas? I think many of us are so scared of letting our investors down, but I am super happy with the character of our investors, who supported us in the best way possible.
mkmk 4y ago
What are some of the biggest lessons you learned from this experience? What do you feel like you did right, and what would you do differently?
- lukethomas 4y ago
  I knew we needed to build a suite of tooling, as our goal was to be a "hub" for the most important stuff at work. In retrospect, we built too much product. If I start another company, I will spend all my time focused on solving a very big pain-point with a few simple product. With Friday, I wanted to keep the product simple, but the people we talked to always were talking about the "yet another tool problem" - so there was a desire to consolidate. How I interpreted this was that we needed to build the "suite" vs. spending all our time on one feature. I could go on and on about what I would do differently, but I'm thankful for the opportunity and have learned a lot that will (hopefully) make me more effective in the future :)
  - nerdponx 4y ago
    Maybe the "yet another tool problem" can be addressed by making your tool easy to integrate with other tools, rather than trying to build a big all-in-one suite.
    - mdip 4y ago
      It depends on if their target audience was small companies or enterprises. It may have made a difference, but it wouldn't have changed much for Enterprise customers. At BigCo (a global telecom[0]), it was much easier to add business from a vendor that we already had a relationship with than it was to purchase anything from anyone we didn't. It was also, of course, much easier to buy software/SaaS from one of the existing, boring, established vendors than lesser known/smaller ones. There was a mess of "Purchasing" involvement, legal, and everything else just to set things up so we could make the purchase. I don't know what Friday was for (had never heard of it until, today), but it sounded like it was something that would be company-wide, probably, so sneaking it in with an "expense card" isn't likely going to be defensible. Then there's the "easy to integrate" side. Expect it to have to pass security reviews if it's SaaS of any kind and will touch any of our IP[1], and particularly detailed ones if it's very easy to "integrate with." Azure AD Login was easy for us at "BigCo", but tied up several days of more than one grumpy security architecture team member's time with a variety of pen-tests that are required before they'll grant approval for it in our domain. That goes up exponentially to the impossible pretty quickly if it wants permissions to access things on our end via OAuth grants; even things that are typical (profile photo). IT Architecture might get involved if there would be a need to make sure it worked with our systems, minimally to set up monitoring for it if we're making it available to a large amount of staff because if it goes down, we'll get a million calls into our 4-6 person (state-side by contractual/security requirements) Help Desk over something we can't do anything about and we're going to make sure we have a way to react to it when that happens. Someone's going to have to learn how to do any administrative/integration requirements, because configuration changes, we merge with companies somewhat frequently, and someone's going to have to make sure they know how to set it all back up, correctly, later -- just in case -- even when it doesn't make sense. Likely, BigCo want it to be used, so someone's going to have to write copy for an article for the company landing page explaining what it is, how it works and what problem it solves. There'll be other activities related to this when adoption doesn't take off. IT will have to dedicate some time to tracking usage to make sure we're getting ROI on it when the quarterlies come around and they have to justify every recurring expense, including the ones outside of the sticker price, all over again, and it's easy to trim off the add-on. Plus, they're often the ones who take the budget hit in the first place. Legal/HR/The Business(tm) might get involved if employees can communicate, uninhibited, through it -- just like they do with E-Mail while they apply a flobbidy-jillion set of restrictions/disclaimers bits of nonsense around. We were not a Defense Contractor, we were just big, spread out and had a lot of employees. At scale, you end up with increasingly many who lack common sense, and a small fraction who still need to be warned about Nigerian Prince scams when one slips through. In a strange alteration of Rule 34, someone will upload porn to it or store porn on it if it is possible to store things on it. For the person who wants the product, it's going to be requiring phone calls, follow-ups, and general "going to bat for the vendor's product" against a hurricane-force headwind. In fact, an add-on might be less likely to be purchased -- by BigCo, anyway -- because it doesn't do enough to pass the "Why do we need to tie up all of these people to bring this easy-to-integrate product into our environment when they can just use (some terrible excuse for a thing by comparison)?" The "we don't need that bad enough" answer is usually the case for Add Ons, and having a number of ancillary capabilities to distract with sometimes makes it more attractive to "the business" side of the above groups, which has the ability, often, to over-ride all of the rest of the "No"s going around. At BigCo, an add-on requiring anything that the "good enough to somewhat OK" solution/solutions we already have kind-of sort-of covers doesn't stand much of a chance of being purchased. The one thing that can get in the door is the simple solution that solves a big problem, especially if there's nothing else out there that much of any part of it from any of the big vendors. I spear-headed a small handful of those. It has to be amazing and some reasonable combination of inexpensive, simple to maintain, highly available, non-critical if down (many, many things are unexpectedly critical). [0] I worked there about a decade for 17 years, incidentally, most of it remote at an organization that was notoriously against remote work ... basically against a major service we enabled and often provided for other businesses. I worked as a software developer in the architecture organization working primarily on security-focused projects (figure that out) and had to go through this process enough to make my soul die a little. [1] Basically, everything. At least, anything that would have a reason for the company to purchase it.
dbbk 4y ago
Were you profitable?
- lukethomas 4y ago
  Heck no. If we were profitable, I would have kept it up and running and reduced things to a skeleton crew.
Dangeranger 4y ago
One of the things I appreciated about Friday was the information you all provided about remote work, and the book you wrote named "The Anywhere Operating System"[0]. Would you be willing to keep the information you provided up as a statically hosted website so that the knowledge is not lost to the ether of the internet, accessible only via archive.org[1]? [0] https://friday.app/anywhere https://friday.app/anywhere [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20220107125929/https://friday.app/p https://web.archive.org/web/20220107125929/https://friday.ap...
- lukethomas 4y ago
  Absolutely. I will 100% keep this up and running and freely available for all. It may be on my own personal website though.
eatonphil 4y ago
What's next?
Nextgrid 4y ago
Is there any reason you can't just leave current the product as-is and keep running it on autopilot, with the only expenses being hosting and the occasional security vulnerability mitigations? You mention you had 100K users - I'm assuming those are paying users. Could they not keep using the product (especially if they've already onboarded)? Or are there significant ongoing costs beyond hosting?
- paxys 4y ago
  > You mention you had 100K users - I'm assuming those are paying users Definitely not. A company of that size with 100K paying users (so like $10M+ ARR) would be considered wildly successful. In their case it was probably a tiny tiny fraction of that.
  - jonnytran 4y ago
    Did you try asking users to pay? I.e. tell your users, you're shutting down unless everyone starts paying. It could be Kickstarter style in that X number of users have to put in their payment information by some date, or you still shut down. That way, there's no chance that some people start paying, but you still shut down.
    - anyfactor 4y ago
      I believe couple of days ago Wordpress made some changes to their pricing and some people immediately reached for their pitchforks. We all have an inherent tendency to associate greed to any business asking for more or any(!) money. I believe for that reason, for some founders it is, "you either die a hero or...."
    - cupofpython 4y ago
      isnt that kind of implied by every service? If you use something for free, dont be surprised if it isnt there tomorrow.
    - gnicholas 4y ago
      Great question. I wish Pebble had done this before shutting down. I would have paid double for my pre-ordered Time Steel 2. Wyze did this recently with their subscription, which they let you pay as little as $0 for. They forced anyone who didn't subscribe onto a lower tier, which only stored still images instead of videos in the cloud.
altdataseller 4y ago
What was the ARR at its peak?
olah_1 4y ago
Anecdotally, I had never heard of this app, but it is relevant to the area i work in (product comms, business operations). Was it difficult to advertise specifically to this audience?
- smt88 4y ago
  The name is unfortunate. It says nothing about the product and also reminds me of Monday.com. I've learned what Friday is at least 5 times and still can't remember.

Hey there, I'm the founder. Happy to answer any questions people have. This was a decision I didn't take lightly.

victor_e 4y ago

Hey. Shame you have to shut it down. Great that you gave it a shot though. Do you have any plans for what is next?

hiimshort 4y ago

What do you plan to do with the platform that you have built? Is all of the code being thrown away?

newusertoday 4y ago

1. what is your opinion on making the code open source? 2. Selling the company so someone else can take care of customers?

trustfundbaby 4y ago
I had this question as well/

nathancahill 4y ago

I'd love to hear your response to this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30933873 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30933873

Dangeranger 4y ago

You mentioned in your post that your primary reason for shutting down was that you didn't find sufficient evidence that your product/service was meeting the needs of your users. Was there also pressure from investors to shut down due to this lack of evidence, or was this a personal decision made based on your principles? Thank you for your consideration.

lukethomas 4y ago
I made the decision after a lot of reflection. We still had ~6 months of runway so I could have spent more time "pivoting" around. The issue was that what I was hearing from prospects, customers, users signaled a bigger issue that could not be solved with a product tweak or two. At the end of the day, I felt like the story I would need to tell a future investor (and new/existing employees) would increasingly become disconnected from the reality I was experiencing talking to customers/users. I didn't feel at peace about it at all. I considered it to be a form of lying.
- carimura 4y ago
  much respect. those are hard feelings to deal with especially given you had users, customers, investors, and a team to think about as well, none of which you can easily and cleanly ask for advice on this matter.
- pedalpete 4y ago
  This is a great answer, I felt the same way about my previous start-up Ayvri.com We make enough to cover our costs, so I've kept it going for the last 2 years. As I kept looking for new ways for us to grow, and what pivots might work, one of our existing investors said to me [paraphasing] "we'll invest more if you know what to do with it, but I [the investor] think you should start thinking about what your next thing is. We'll invest in that, but there comes a time you need to move on". That chat was really impactful, they were happy to see us launch a product, get customers, and try to build something really amazing (and we kinda did). The same team that created Ayvri (most of us) have come back together to create https://soundmind.co https://soundmind.co - we haven't taken investment yet, but the same investors are ready to back us when we do. Did you have that kind of support from your investors @Lukethomas? I think many of us are so scared of letting our investors down, but I am super happy with the character of our investors, who supported us in the best way possible.

mkmk 4y ago

What are some of the biggest lessons you learned from this experience? What do you feel like you did right, and what would you do differently?

lukethomas 4y ago
I knew we needed to build a suite of tooling, as our goal was to be a "hub" for the most important stuff at work. In retrospect, we built too much product. If I start another company, I will spend all my time focused on solving a very big pain-point with a few simple product. With Friday, I wanted to keep the product simple, but the people we talked to always were talking about the "yet another tool problem" - so there was a desire to consolidate. How I interpreted this was that we needed to build the "suite" vs. spending all our time on one feature. I could go on and on about what I would do differently, but I'm thankful for the opportunity and have learned a lot that will (hopefully) make me more effective in the future :)
- nerdponx 4y ago
  Maybe the "yet another tool problem" can be addressed by making your tool easy to integrate with other tools, rather than trying to build a big all-in-one suite.
  - mdip 4y ago
    It depends on if their target audience was small companies or enterprises. It may have made a difference, but it wouldn't have changed much for Enterprise customers. At BigCo (a global telecom[0]), it was much easier to add business from a vendor that we already had a relationship with than it was to purchase anything from anyone we didn't. It was also, of course, much easier to buy software/SaaS from one of the existing, boring, established vendors than lesser known/smaller ones. There was a mess of "Purchasing" involvement, legal, and everything else just to set things up so we could make the purchase. I don't know what Friday was for (had never heard of it until, today), but it sounded like it was something that would be company-wide, probably, so sneaking it in with an "expense card" isn't likely going to be defensible. Then there's the "easy to integrate" side. Expect it to have to pass security reviews if it's SaaS of any kind and will touch any of our IP[1], and particularly detailed ones if it's very easy to "integrate with." Azure AD Login was easy for us at "BigCo", but tied up several days of more than one grumpy security architecture team member's time with a variety of pen-tests that are required before they'll grant approval for it in our domain. That goes up exponentially to the impossible pretty quickly if it wants permissions to access things on our end via OAuth grants; even things that are typical (profile photo). IT Architecture might get involved if there would be a need to make sure it worked with our systems, minimally to set up monitoring for it if we're making it available to a large amount of staff because if it goes down, we'll get a million calls into our 4-6 person (state-side by contractual/security requirements) Help Desk over something we can't do anything about and we're going to make sure we have a way to react to it when that happens. Someone's going to have to learn how to do any administrative/integration requirements, because configuration changes, we merge with companies somewhat frequently, and someone's going to have to make sure they know how to set it all back up, correctly, later -- just in case -- even when it doesn't make sense. Likely, BigCo want it to be used, so someone's going to have to write copy for an article for the company landing page explaining what it is, how it works and what problem it solves. There'll be other activities related to this when adoption doesn't take off. IT will have to dedicate some time to tracking usage to make sure we're getting ROI on it when the quarterlies come around and they have to justify every recurring expense, including the ones outside of the sticker price, all over again, and it's easy to trim off the add-on. Plus, they're often the ones who take the budget hit in the first place. Legal/HR/The Business(tm) might get involved if employees can communicate, uninhibited, through it -- just like they do with E-Mail while they apply a flobbidy-jillion set of restrictions/disclaimers bits of nonsense around. We were not a Defense Contractor, we were just big, spread out and had a lot of employees. At scale, you end up with increasingly many who lack common sense, and a small fraction who still need to be warned about Nigerian Prince scams when one slips through. In a strange alteration of Rule 34, someone will upload porn to it or store porn on it if it is possible to store things on it. For the person who wants the product, it's going to be requiring phone calls, follow-ups, and general "going to bat for the vendor's product" against a hurricane-force headwind. In fact, an add-on might be less likely to be purchased -- by BigCo, anyway -- because it doesn't do enough to pass the "Why do we need to tie up all of these people to bring this easy-to-integrate product into our environment when they can just use (some terrible excuse for a thing by comparison)?" The "we don't need that bad enough" answer is usually the case for Add Ons, and having a number of ancillary capabilities to distract with sometimes makes it more attractive to "the business" side of the above groups, which has the ability, often, to over-ride all of the rest of the "No"s going around. At BigCo, an add-on requiring anything that the "good enough to somewhat OK" solution/solutions we already have kind-of sort-of covers doesn't stand much of a chance of being purchased. The one thing that can get in the door is the simple solution that solves a big problem, especially if there's nothing else out there that much of any part of it from any of the big vendors. I spear-headed a small handful of those. It has to be amazing and some reasonable combination of inexpensive, simple to maintain, highly available, non-critical if down (many, many things are unexpectedly critical). [0] I worked there about a decade for 17 years, incidentally, most of it remote at an organization that was notoriously against remote work ... basically against a major service we enabled and often provided for other businesses. I worked as a software developer in the architecture organization working primarily on security-focused projects (figure that out) and had to go through this process enough to make my soul die a little. [1] Basically, everything. At least, anything that would have a reason for the company to purchase it.

dbbk 4y ago

Were you profitable?

lukethomas 4y ago
Heck no. If we were profitable, I would have kept it up and running and reduced things to a skeleton crew.

Dangeranger 4y ago

One of the things I appreciated about Friday was the information you all provided about remote work, and the book you wrote named "The Anywhere Operating System"[0]. Would you be willing to keep the information you provided up as a statically hosted website so that the knowledge is not lost to the ether of the internet, accessible only via archive.org[1]? [0] https://friday.app/anywhere https://friday.app/anywhere [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20220107125929/https://friday.app/p https://web.archive.org/web/20220107125929/https://friday.ap...

lukethomas 4y ago
Absolutely. I will 100% keep this up and running and freely available for all. It may be on my own personal website though.

eatonphil 4y ago

What's next?

Nextgrid 4y ago

Is there any reason you can't just leave current the product as-is and keep running it on autopilot, with the only expenses being hosting and the occasional security vulnerability mitigations? You mention you had 100K users - I'm assuming those are paying users. Could they not keep using the product (especially if they've already onboarded)? Or are there significant ongoing costs beyond hosting?

paxys 4y ago
> You mention you had 100K users - I'm assuming those are paying users Definitely not. A company of that size with 100K paying users (so like $10M+ ARR) would be considered wildly successful. In their case it was probably a tiny tiny fraction of that.
- jonnytran 4y ago
  Did you try asking users to pay? I.e. tell your users, you're shutting down unless everyone starts paying. It could be Kickstarter style in that X number of users have to put in their payment information by some date, or you still shut down. That way, there's no chance that some people start paying, but you still shut down.
  - anyfactor 4y ago
    I believe couple of days ago Wordpress made some changes to their pricing and some people immediately reached for their pitchforks. We all have an inherent tendency to associate greed to any business asking for more or any(!) money. I believe for that reason, for some founders it is, "you either die a hero or...."
  - cupofpython 4y ago
    isnt that kind of implied by every service? If you use something for free, dont be surprised if it isnt there tomorrow.
  - gnicholas 4y ago
    Great question. I wish Pebble had done this before shutting down. I would have paid double for my pre-ordered Time Steel 2. Wyze did this recently with their subscription, which they let you pay as little as $0 for. They forced anyone who didn't subscribe onto a lower tier, which only stored still images instead of videos in the cloud.

altdataseller 4y ago

What was the ARR at its peak?

olah_1 4y ago

Anecdotally, I had never heard of this app, but it is relevant to the area i work in (product comms, business operations). Was it difficult to advertise specifically to this audience?

smt88 4y ago
The name is unfortunate. It says nothing about the product and also reminds me of Monday.com. I've learned what Friday is at least 5 times and still can't remember.