7 ms·

Yahoo Acquires Astrid

82 points by bretthellman 13y ago

yumraj 13y ago
<sarcasm> I thought Yahoo was in trouble and had a glut of employees. Rather, it seems they have found a pot of gold and don't have enough employees to execute their plan for world domination. </sarcasm>
mehrzad 13y ago
It seems companies other than people like 37signals and indie game studios don't want to be small and independent? I could be wrong about this analysis, but I find the aquihire trend somewhat depressing.
- jfernandez 13y ago
  I'd say some people are in it to get absorbed sure, but there are also people who wanted to make it on their own but can't because of continual funding, the need to compete with free competitors, etc.
- dangrossman 13y ago
  How many companies are acquihired a year? Dozens? Hundreds? Thousands? Half a million new businesses are started every year in the US (with actual employees, not self-employed working from home). Most small businesses stay that way.
  - mehrzad 13y ago
    Do you think the numbers are similar in tech?
jpatokal 13y ago
> The app will remain online for another 90 days before it’s shut down by Yahoo. In the meantime, it’s not accepting any new users. Well, crap. Any migration path or alternatives? I don't even need 99% of Astrid's bells and whistles, just your basic "add entries and tick 'em off" todo list along the lines of what the Palm V used to do.
- emmelaich 13y ago
  I use gtasks on Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.dayup.gtask https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.dayup.gtas... .. and Google Keep for notes.
- mehrzad 13y ago
  If you use Evernote, make a notebook called Todo. Why use another app? (probably not what you want, but it works for me)
  - e40 13y ago
    Because doing that falls far short of the features available in a real todo app like Astrid?
- jcomis 13y ago
  I've gone through a bunch, Any.DO was the one that stuck with me (Android, iOS, and Chrome extension)
- ConstantineXVI 13y ago
  I'm a recent convert to Remember the Milk[0], can't recommend it enough (the apparent stable business model is a plus as well, I recall using them back in the Blackberry era) [0] http://rememberthemilk.com http://rememberthemilk.com
- jbredeche 13y ago
  I recently started using Asana just for my personal to-do list, it's not bad and it's free. Haven't tried the mobile apps yet, but they look pretty good.
- dirtae 13y ago
  For a basic todo list, you might like our app, AnyList (available for iOS): http://www.anylistapp.com http://www.anylistapp.com We are primarily focused on grocery shopping lists, but it'll work fine for other simple lists, and makes it really easy to share lists and collaborate with other people.
georgemcbay 13y ago
I used Astrid for a while and just switched over to Google Keep a couple weeks ago. I highly recommend it for people who just want simple synced to-do/notes. Yes, they could Google-Reader-it at any time, I suppose, but for something transient like todos I'm not too worried about it.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
aymeric 13y ago
I run a time management app, and I will develop a Astrid importer if there is enough interest: http://weekplan.net/import-your-astrid-tasks-into-week-plan/ http://weekplan.net/import-your-astrid-tasks-into-week-plan/
codyps 13y ago
> Yahoo Acquires 4M-User ‘To Do’ App Astrid, Will Shut It Down In 90 Days I'm afraid I'm not familiar with what scale Yahoo operates on, but wouldn't it be more beneficial for them to merge Astrid into whatever their plans are rather than drop them and alienate people who were already users? Or was it just seen as a potential resource hole (with the value of the users seen as negative)? Can anyone shed some light on what Astrid's business model was?
- gcb0 13y ago
  it's an acquihire. they are not buying any product. (peanut butter spread too thin, etc) they just have a lot of money to hire, and nobody wants to work there. So they do the dumbest thing a company can. Spends 10~30million a head, and they are out the door as soon as their contract allows. (case in point, your host. and he was even a case where yahoo wanted to buy the product...) oh, and they are so sure everyone is leaving, that the new policy (look it up, was on techcrunch) is to give out annual bonuses instead of pay rises and promotions.
  - MyNewAccount99 13y ago
    who is his host?
  - MyNewAccount99 13y ago
    who is his host?
- pja 13y ago
  Astid's business model was "Free app, with paid for extra features". The free app was close to feature complete though: the extra features you could buy were fairly small & so buying the upgrades was really just making a donation to the devs. They may have expanded the paid services since I used the app though: I used it for a while and it was pretty good, but I found the UI a bit clunky and difficult to navigate once you wanted to do anything more complex than simple tick-box todo lists and I eventually gave up on it.
jameswyse 13y ago
While we're suggesting todo apps - I've been using Clear [1] (Mac + iPhone only) for the past month and love it. The UI is beautiful yet very simple as everything is done with touch gestures. [1] http://www.realmacsoftware.com/clear/ http://www.realmacsoftware.com/clear/
noahmbarr 13y ago
Astrid ran hard to make an app that millions of people use constantly. As a startup, they took a risk, ran hard at an idea, and executed their ass off. We should all be so lucky. Regarding this "acquihire" talk: This is something the naysayers like to talk about. Yahoo's scale present an incredible sandbox for the Astrid team. They are a fully contained, highly functional team (across product and engineering disciplines). They know how to build back-end systems, complex web-apps, and cross-platform mobile apps. The fact that someone found a higher and better use is not a failure on their part. Yahoo is fortunate to have this team join their ranks.
- mscarborough 13y ago
  I agree. I left Yahoo during the Scott Thompson time, but see the value in Mayer. I love Yahoo, always have, but I'm hoping that Mayer cuts out 2-3 layers of management. When I was there, it was embarrassing to talk to my boss, who clearly didn't give a shit about my team or our department. The dude did nothing but suck up to Sunnyvale. Hopefully they fire folks like him.
nnutter 13y ago
The key feature I used Astrid for was the ability to have recurring tasks based on the date of last completion instead of fixed intervals. Does anything else out there do that?
- hnha 13y ago
  "regularly" is free of cost and does that. it has no syncing support with I consider a good thing as it contains very personal data that only concerns myself.
  - nnutter 13y ago
    That looks really good but I forgot to mention that I am looking for an iOS app.
- nnutter 13y ago
  I've found a couple. Doesn't seem like anyone else had the same use case as me but in case someone does... When: http://when-app.com http://when-app.com Doable: http://doableapp.com http://doableapp.com When "rips off" Clear's UI and looks interesting. Doable has a very custom UI and looks like it has a couple more features, e.g. statistics. It looks like neither supports date-fixed tasks. If you need both you'll likely have to use Reminders or something in addition to one of these.
egypturnash 13y ago
Guess I'm picking a new to-do program, then. Honestly I don't spend as much time with Astrid since I switched to iOS, I really got used to its geofencing capabilities on Android. Anyone got any suggestions for an iOS/Mac to-do program that can do geofencing for entire lists, instead of single todos like Apple's Reminders?
- lepht 13y ago
  Checkmark does exactly this, and is overall pretty great: http://builtbysnowman.com/checkmark/ http://builtbysnowman.com/checkmark/
  - egypturnash 13y ago
    That looks pretty neat! Sadly it's missing a bigger requirement for me, which is syncing. Thanks, though.
jmspring 13y ago
Congratulations Jon Paris and team. Good to see someone you graduated high school with having good luck. Super nice guy and good product.
KurtMueller 13y ago
"Trello trello trello" - Sung to the tune of Rihanna's Umbrella
pbreit 13y ago
Just goes to show that you shouldn't rely on free apps...oh, wait, nevermind.
joshuagross 13y ago
Huge congrats to Jon and Tim! I worked with them in 2011 and it's an amazing team that I'd be honored to work with any day. Yahoo! is lucky to have them.
- saumil07 13y ago
  I did AngelPad with them in Winter 2011 and we worked out of the same office building for a year. Awesome guys, great passion, sharp technologists and all around good people. Couldn't have happened to better people.
general_failure 13y ago
(from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5642484 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5642484) I don't want to take anything away from Astrid. I keeps dismissing my ideas as trivial and already done. When I think I have a new idea, my friends would dismiss it as trivial and already done. Take astrid's todo list or task sharing for example. My initial and only thought would be 'does the world need another todo app', 'another list making app' really? If I take the idea to my friends, they would bombard me with companies who do exactly the same thing. And yet here we are with Astrid being acquired. It seems to have some angel investment/funding even. The founders may not be millionaires but they definitely made more money than I did. Note to self: do something. anything. and get acquired.
- robg 13y ago
  "Make something people want" is too esoteric? Astrid was founded in 2008. If step (a) is above, and step (b) is simply "Persevere", then such a note to yourself becomes: Make something people want. Persevere. Somehow that seems far more likely to end in the manner you'd like.
  - jacquesm 13y ago
    The perseverance component is often overlooked, I personally believe it is the single most important factor determining the eventual success or failure of a business.
  - Kudos 13y ago
    They were also first to market with a decent Android todo app and kept that momentum up.
  - general_failure 13y ago
    Actually no. 'Make something that people want' makes you over think and do all sorts of market analysis and guesstimates. I would say this as 'make something you want and sell it to yourself.'
shaunxcode 13y ago
Sweet, maybe they can afford to address some of the insane bugs they have accreted. I normally defend developers/software when people I know complain about an app - but this is like a year and a half of really bad/frustrating bugs. Disappearing tasks, duplicated tasks, inability to enter tasks at certain times of the day.... And ultimately not responding to emails regarding these issues. If you are going to provide an app which is in essence an augmentation of someones mind you should take the responsibility seriously.
rkda 13y ago
Just checked and saw that Astrid is open source. Not sure if it's the latest version though. https://github.com/todoroo/astrid https://github.com/todoroo/astrid Now if only someone would adopt it :(
- egypturnash 13y ago
  Are the iOS client, web client, and web backend also open-source?

82 points by bretthellman 13y ago

<sarcasm> I thought Yahoo was in trouble and had a glut of employees. Rather, it seems they have found a pot of gold and don't have enough employees to execute their plan for world domination. </sarcasm>

mehrzad 13y ago

It seems companies other than people like 37signals and indie game studios don't want to be small and independent? I could be wrong about this analysis, but I find the aquihire trend somewhat depressing.

jfernandez 13y ago
I'd say some people are in it to get absorbed sure, but there are also people who wanted to make it on their own but can't because of continual funding, the need to compete with free competitors, etc.
dangrossman 13y ago
How many companies are acquihired a year? Dozens? Hundreds? Thousands? Half a million new businesses are started every year in the US (with actual employees, not self-employed working from home). Most small businesses stay that way.
- mehrzad 13y ago
  Do you think the numbers are similar in tech?

jpatokal 13y ago

> The app will remain online for another 90 days before it’s shut down by Yahoo. In the meantime, it’s not accepting any new users. Well, crap. Any migration path or alternatives? I don't even need 99% of Astrid's bells and whistles, just your basic "add entries and tick 'em off" todo list along the lines of what the Palm V used to do.

emmelaich 13y ago
I use gtasks on Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.dayup.gtask https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.dayup.gtas... .. and Google Keep for notes.
mehrzad 13y ago
If you use Evernote, make a notebook called Todo. Why use another app? (probably not what you want, but it works for me)
- e40 13y ago
  Because doing that falls far short of the features available in a real todo app like Astrid?
jcomis 13y ago
I've gone through a bunch, Any.DO was the one that stuck with me (Android, iOS, and Chrome extension)
ConstantineXVI 13y ago
I'm a recent convert to Remember the Milk[0], can't recommend it enough (the apparent stable business model is a plus as well, I recall using them back in the Blackberry era) [0] http://rememberthemilk.com http://rememberthemilk.com
jbredeche 13y ago
I recently started using Asana just for my personal to-do list, it's not bad and it's free. Haven't tried the mobile apps yet, but they look pretty good.
dirtae 13y ago
For a basic todo list, you might like our app, AnyList (available for iOS): http://www.anylistapp.com http://www.anylistapp.com We are primarily focused on grocery shopping lists, but it'll work fine for other simple lists, and makes it really easy to share lists and collaborate with other people.

georgemcbay 13y ago

I used Astrid for a while and just switched over to Google Keep a couple weeks ago. I highly recommend it for people who just want simple synced to-do/notes. Yes, they could Google-Reader-it at any time, I suppose, but for something transient like todos I'm not too worried about it.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

aymeric 13y ago

I run a time management app, and I will develop a Astrid importer if there is enough interest: http://weekplan.net/import-your-astrid-tasks-into-week-plan/ http://weekplan.net/import-your-astrid-tasks-into-week-plan/

codyps 13y ago

> Yahoo Acquires 4M-User ‘To Do’ App Astrid, Will Shut It Down In 90 Days I'm afraid I'm not familiar with what scale Yahoo operates on, but wouldn't it be more beneficial for them to merge Astrid into whatever their plans are rather than drop them and alienate people who were already users? Or was it just seen as a potential resource hole (with the value of the users seen as negative)? Can anyone shed some light on what Astrid's business model was?

gcb0 13y ago
it's an acquihire. they are not buying any product. (peanut butter spread too thin, etc) they just have a lot of money to hire, and nobody wants to work there. So they do the dumbest thing a company can. Spends 10~30million a head, and they are out the door as soon as their contract allows. (case in point, your host. and he was even a case where yahoo wanted to buy the product...) oh, and they are so sure everyone is leaving, that the new policy (look it up, was on techcrunch) is to give out annual bonuses instead of pay rises and promotions.
- MyNewAccount99 13y ago
  who is his host?
- MyNewAccount99 13y ago
  who is his host?
pja 13y ago
Astid's business model was "Free app, with paid for extra features". The free app was close to feature complete though: the extra features you could buy were fairly small & so buying the upgrades was really just making a donation to the devs. They may have expanded the paid services since I used the app though: I used it for a while and it was pretty good, but I found the UI a bit clunky and difficult to navigate once you wanted to do anything more complex than simple tick-box todo lists and I eventually gave up on it.

jameswyse 13y ago

While we're suggesting todo apps - I've been using Clear [1] (Mac + iPhone only) for the past month and love it. The UI is beautiful yet very simple as everything is done with touch gestures. [1] http://www.realmacsoftware.com/clear/ http://www.realmacsoftware.com/clear/

noahmbarr 13y ago

Astrid ran hard to make an app that millions of people use constantly. As a startup, they took a risk, ran hard at an idea, and executed their ass off. We should all be so lucky. Regarding this "acquihire" talk: This is something the naysayers like to talk about. Yahoo's scale present an incredible sandbox for the Astrid team. They are a fully contained, highly functional team (across product and engineering disciplines). They know how to build back-end systems, complex web-apps, and cross-platform mobile apps. The fact that someone found a higher and better use is not a failure on their part. Yahoo is fortunate to have this team join their ranks.

mscarborough 13y ago
I agree. I left Yahoo during the Scott Thompson time, but see the value in Mayer. I love Yahoo, always have, but I'm hoping that Mayer cuts out 2-3 layers of management. When I was there, it was embarrassing to talk to my boss, who clearly didn't give a shit about my team or our department. The dude did nothing but suck up to Sunnyvale. Hopefully they fire folks like him.

nnutter 13y ago

The key feature I used Astrid for was the ability to have recurring tasks based on the date of last completion instead of fixed intervals. Does anything else out there do that?

hnha 13y ago
"regularly" is free of cost and does that. it has no syncing support with I consider a good thing as it contains very personal data that only concerns myself.
- nnutter 13y ago
  That looks really good but I forgot to mention that I am looking for an iOS app.
nnutter 13y ago
I've found a couple. Doesn't seem like anyone else had the same use case as me but in case someone does... When: http://when-app.com http://when-app.com Doable: http://doableapp.com http://doableapp.com When "rips off" Clear's UI and looks interesting. Doable has a very custom UI and looks like it has a couple more features, e.g. statistics. It looks like neither supports date-fixed tasks. If you need both you'll likely have to use Reminders or something in addition to one of these.

egypturnash 13y ago

Guess I'm picking a new to-do program, then. Honestly I don't spend as much time with Astrid since I switched to iOS, I really got used to its geofencing capabilities on Android. Anyone got any suggestions for an iOS/Mac to-do program that can do geofencing for entire lists, instead of single todos like Apple's Reminders?

lepht 13y ago
Checkmark does exactly this, and is overall pretty great: http://builtbysnowman.com/checkmark/ http://builtbysnowman.com/checkmark/
- egypturnash 13y ago
  That looks pretty neat! Sadly it's missing a bigger requirement for me, which is syncing. Thanks, though.

jmspring 13y ago

Congratulations Jon Paris and team. Good to see someone you graduated high school with having good luck. Super nice guy and good product.

KurtMueller 13y ago

"Trello trello trello" - Sung to the tune of Rihanna's Umbrella

pbreit 13y ago

Just goes to show that you shouldn't rely on free apps...oh, wait, nevermind.

joshuagross 13y ago

Huge congrats to Jon and Tim! I worked with them in 2011 and it's an amazing team that I'd be honored to work with any day. Yahoo! is lucky to have them.

saumil07 13y ago
I did AngelPad with them in Winter 2011 and we worked out of the same office building for a year. Awesome guys, great passion, sharp technologists and all around good people. Couldn't have happened to better people.

general_failure 13y ago

(from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5642484 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5642484) I don't want to take anything away from Astrid. I keeps dismissing my ideas as trivial and already done. When I think I have a new idea, my friends would dismiss it as trivial and already done. Take astrid's todo list or task sharing for example. My initial and only thought would be 'does the world need another todo app', 'another list making app' really? If I take the idea to my friends, they would bombard me with companies who do exactly the same thing. And yet here we are with Astrid being acquired. It seems to have some angel investment/funding even. The founders may not be millionaires but they definitely made more money than I did. Note to self: do something. anything. and get acquired.

robg 13y ago
"Make something people want" is too esoteric? Astrid was founded in 2008. If step (a) is above, and step (b) is simply "Persevere", then such a note to yourself becomes: Make something people want. Persevere. Somehow that seems far more likely to end in the manner you'd like.
- jacquesm 13y ago
  The perseverance component is often overlooked, I personally believe it is the single most important factor determining the eventual success or failure of a business.
- Kudos 13y ago
  They were also first to market with a decent Android todo app and kept that momentum up.
- general_failure 13y ago
  Actually no. 'Make something that people want' makes you over think and do all sorts of market analysis and guesstimates. I would say this as 'make something you want and sell it to yourself.'

shaunxcode 13y ago

Sweet, maybe they can afford to address some of the insane bugs they have accreted. I normally defend developers/software when people I know complain about an app - but this is like a year and a half of really bad/frustrating bugs. Disappearing tasks, duplicated tasks, inability to enter tasks at certain times of the day.... And ultimately not responding to emails regarding these issues. If you are going to provide an app which is in essence an augmentation of someones mind you should take the responsibility seriously.

rkda 13y ago

Just checked and saw that Astrid is open source. Not sure if it's the latest version though. https://github.com/todoroo/astrid https://github.com/todoroo/astrid Now if only someone would adopt it :(

egypturnash 13y ago
Are the iOS client, web client, and web backend also open-source?