Twitter acquires Clutch.io

http://blog.clutch.io/post/29340796276/clutch-joins-the-flock

by j4mie • 14 years ago

177 34 14 years ago

blog.clutch.io

BaconJuice• 14 years ago

Congrats to the Team at Clutch.io :)

brackin• 14 years ago

Congrats, this is interesting because Eric Florenzano one of the co-founders co-founded Convore.

mulligan• 14 years ago

actually, both erics

k-mcgrady• 14 years ago

Congratulations to the team! They had a really cool product and the way they are handling the acquisition is great. Glad they aren't just killing it.

simonw• 14 years ago

Congrats to the two Erics - and I love the way you're handling the transition and existing customers, seems very classy.

mceachen• 14 years ago

It's inline with how those guys are. Classy hackers.

mibbitier2• 14 years ago

I don't want to moan, but I wish we could get out of this mindset of reporting "company X acquires company Y" when in fact it's a case of company Y shutting down and the founders going to work at company X.

Congrats anyway.

joshu• 14 years ago

Unless some money was paid to the investors. You don't know.

ericflo• 14 years ago

We took good care of all our investors

mibbitier2• 14 years ago

Sorry, that wasn't really my point.

If I started a company up, had no investment, then decided to go work at bigco on the understanding I could say they acquired my company, then it's all quite meaningless.

It's just a shame to see so many deadpooled companies and products through acquihires spun as "yay success!".

Maybe I'm just getting old ;)

As I say though, congrats on the new job.

masukomi• 14 years ago

I think mbitter's point might be better explained by an example from outside the world of computers. Audi (high end cars), for example, recently acquired Ducati (high end motorcycles). No-one expects Ducati to be shuttered. Instead, people are expecting both companies to remain and to share their IP and improve both the cars and and motorcycles as knowledge flows from both companies.

In the land of computers being acquired tends to mean the acquired co. shutters their business, and everything they worked on ceases to be available to the customers who made them a company worth acquiring. I seriously applaud your allowing customers to set up their own servers. It's quite atypical... but it's kind of a dead-end thing unless you open-source the code. "Hooray... We can continue... but things will never improve, bugs will never be fixed, and our needs will eventually exceed the capabilities of the software that no-one is working on anymore."

Wouldn't it be nicer if the acquiring company valued the company being acquired enough to keep it going, or roll its functionality into its own offerings so that customers can continue being served?

ed• 14 years ago

Whoa! Congrats to the Erics, awesome news, guys!

mikek• 14 years ago

Are there any alternatives to Clutch.io?

tylerneylon• 14 years ago

Something similar is appgrok.com which offers server-side control of bundled files, including nib files. It doesn't have a built-in experiment framework, but you could mix AppGrok with analytics to get some experiments-without-app-store-submission working, if that's your goal. (I'm a developer at AppGrok.)

AndyD1st2• 14 years ago

We just posted a comment explaining our alternative. Ping us at founders <at> leanplum <dot> com if you want to chat.

zmb• 14 years ago

Take a look at our side project Switchboard: easy A/B testing for mobile

https://github.com/KeepSafe/Switchboard It's open source

My co-founder Philipp is talking about this project at next week's Silicon Valley iOS Dev Meetup http://www.meetup.com/sviphone/events/38752252/

dmh002• 14 years ago

swrve.com

A/B testing for mobile and social apps

dotmanish• 14 years ago

When this happens, I personally would love to see a blog post by the founders on how the soon-to-be-shut business was actually doing, so that current competitors and other startup-watchers can learn. You're anyways leaving the space open, so better to leave the lessons behind.

indiecore• 14 years ago

>We’re happy to announce that over the coming weeks we will make available everything you need to run Clutch.io on your own servers, so that even after our hosted service is no longer running, you can continue to operate it on your own.

Everyone take note. This is how you handle an aquihire correctly

teamlaft• 14 years ago

Agreed. Seems like everyone is a winner given how they are handling things.

js4all• 14 years ago

Congrats and thanks for keeping the idea up; a noble gesture.

dave5104• 14 years ago

Is it just me, or does there seem to be a plethora of companies named in the form something.io nowadays? Feels like it's the next version of Flickr and all the diminutives missing that 'e'.

oinksoft• 14 years ago

.io seems solidified as branding indicating that the business is oriented to developers, being a niche of "B2B." It may feel like a fad but the TLD is valuable for reasons other than availability, unlike deliberate misspellings you cite such as Flickr.

Aaronontheweb• 14 years ago

If I may ask, what issues were the Cluch.io guys having building a sustainable business around A/B testing for mobile?

AndyD1st2• 14 years ago

We’re a new TechStars company who’ve built a super simple mobile A/B testing tool. Could be a great alternative to Clutch. If you’d like to try it out, or give us feedback or ideas, ping us at founders <at> leanplum <dot> com.

mahmoudimus• 14 years ago

Congratulations to the two Erics!

aneth4• 14 years ago

While we can't blame any individual team taking an aquihire deal, I have to wonder if their prevalence these days is undermining future startups and sending potential customers back to an old school mindset of going with large vendors who are less likely to shut down.

After all, why work with a company made up of a few 25 year olds testing out a market, who may "pivot" any time, and will shut down their product when some big company wants to hire them? Seems like a justifiable choice to go with an inferior product from a profitable established company which is much less likely to disappear in two years.

Even as a startup guy, I'm hesitant to build on startup products. YC Startups may be even worse in this context as they are frequently picked off and shut down, and the founders are young and not necessarily in the product for the long haul.

Twitter acquires Clutch.io

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